I promise that I'll do a couple of blogs about something other than politics after this blog. This was just too damn Faustian for me to ignore. In 2000, Senator John McCain ran a much admired presidential campaign under the slogan "Straight Talk Express". In the process, he very nearly remade the Republican party before George W. Bush won the Republican nomination and anyone who hasn't been living in a cave the last eight years knows what happened since. But over the last few years we've watched a gradual devolution from "Straight Talk Express" to something that hurts to look at. In his quest to become president, John McCain has gone back on everything that made him a statesman, a great man, originally back in 2000.

The media hasn't caught up to this change yet, but I hope that they will eventually. I laid out a brief summary of some of the issues he has "evolved" on since his 2000 incarnation in response to a blog by ImaginaryFriend, but that is nothing compared to what he did today. As most of the civilized world knows, the U.S. has struggled with the "debate" on whether or not we should torture since the Abu Ghraib pictures emerged. As the Bush Administration repeated the transparently idiotic "we do not torture" platitudes that most intelligent people recognized as a blatant falsehood, Democrats in Congress have fought a mostly losing effort to stop "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" being conducted under the approval of "the leader of the free world".

With the November 2006 elections finally giving control of both houses of Congress back to the Democrats, today they voted on a bill that would have specifically limited interrogation tactics to what is outlined in the Army Field Manual. Senator McCain, despite the fact he is running for president, had an opportunity to vote on the bill. It would seem a nobrainer that a man who was a POW in a Vietamese prison camp for five years and has been, according a fawning media, one of the leading opponents of torture in the U.S., would vote in favor of this bill. Guess again. Faust. Before this vote I was actually considering voting for McCain if Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination. No longer. Edit: I'm a pretty even-tempered guy. It takes a lot to actually get me angry. Frankly, the only people these days who can actually manage to get me really furious are ChiliDragon and my family, because I care about their opinions so much. Well, I can tell you that I'm genuinely pissed off about this. A man who has actually been tortured cares about himself and his career so much that in an effort to appease the lunatic rightwing base he'd prefer to vote to allow others to be tortured as he was in order to further his ambition. I'm an agnostic when it comes to spirtual matters, but if I did have a strong belief in god, this is the sort of thing that I would think would land people in hell.