yup, John McCain. . . still an asshole

Oh, what a big show the Senator from Arizona made this week. McCain used his “special status” to draw a line in the sand about what would and would not be permissible when it came to detainees in the “war on terror.” Forget the fact that by denying captives habeas rights, any restrictions on “rough interrogation” were meaningless grandstanding, John McCain, a victim of torture, himself, would not let the Bush Administration get away with this.

What a lot of crap.

With a “compromise” now reached between the White House and the three “renegade” Senators, everybody is on the same page: Republicans stand firmly behind torture.

The New York Times has published an editorial that is almost as disdainful of this phony compromise as I am. Read it—it makes up for a lot of the breathless reporting that appeared on the more frontward pages of the Times.

Then, knowing that this legislation is an affront to all we hold dear as a nation, contact your Senators and tell them you expect them to oppose this bill—not just by voting against it, but by preventing it from coming to a vote.

If the Democrats aren’t going use the filibuster to thwart this sinister piece of garbage (and the sinister asshole that brokered it), then what was the sense in backing down earlier in the session to preserve the filibuster?