CT Blue

According to my Dictionary, “mostly” means “for the greatest part; mainly”. I looked it up to make sure that I hadn’t misconceived its meaning after reading this comparison of Bush and McCain in this morning’s Times. What with Bush’s second coming trying to distance himself from his soul mate, the Times provided a handy guide to the issues on which Bush and McCain mostly agree, and those on which they mostly disagree. I went right to the latter section of course, and I must say there were some stretchers in there.

Let’s start with the most obvious:

TAX BREAKS Mr. Bush opposes a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Mr. McCain has voted against similar taxes in the past, but this month he said he was “angry at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they’ve made but at their failure to invest in alternate energy.”

It’s really hard to see any disagreement there. A little razzle dazzle rhetoric does not a disagreement make. Here’s an excerpt from today’s USA Today:

McCain criticized Obama, his Democratic rival, repeatedly in excerpts of a speech planned for delivery Tuesday evening. He cited Obama’s advocacy of a tax on excess oil industry profits as well as the Democrat’s vote for President Bush’s energy legislation in 2005.

McCain reserved his sharpest words for the windfall profits tax.

Maybe we can’t blame the Times on this one. In the same USA today article:

But on May 5, campaigning in North Carolina, McCain said he was willing to consider the same proposal.

“I don’t like obscene profits being made anywhere. I’d be glad to look not just at the windfall profits tax, that’s not what bothers me, but we should look at any incentives that we are giving to people — or industries or corporations — that are distorting the markets,” he said.

Nonetheless, there was never any evidence that McCain favored such a tax, so whatever the merits of the tax, McCain and Bush are totally sympatico on this one.

Next up:

DRILLING Mr. McCain opposes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, once a top goal for Mr. Bush. On Monday, Mr. McCain said the federal ban on offshore drilling should be lifted, allowing states to pursue energy exploration off their coasts. The Bush administration has proposed drilling off the coasts in several states.

So while McCain opposes drilling in one place Bush wants to drill, he favors drilling in places even Bush doesn’t. I fail to see how they “mostly” disagree on this topic. They mostly agree, with McCain deviating in one respect for the sake of a quick pander.

Here’s my favorite:

Interrogation techniques: Mr. McCain has battled the Bush administration on a number of bills to end torture by the U.S. But this year he voted against a bill to force the Central Intelligence Agency to abide by the rules set out in the Army field Manual on interrogation. He said that a 2005 law he helped pass already prohibits the C.I.A. from “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.” But the same law gives the president the last word in establishing specific permissible interrogation techniques. The Bush administration has not ruled out waterboarding, considered illegal by Mr. McCain, as impermissible.

But in fact, McCain took a dive on anti-torture legislation. After all, he’s not being tortured anymore, and he really doesn’t care if he exposes the 100 year soldiers to torture by the other side, which can now rightfully claim that they have just as much right to torture as us. As Glenn Greenwald explains, Bush can get away with claiming that he can violate the Geneva convention because:

There are two reasons, and two reasons only, that the Bush administration is able to claim this power: John McCain and the Military Commissions Act. In September, 2006, McCain made a melodramatic display — with great media fanfare — of insisting that the MCA require compliance with the Geneva Conventions for all detainees. But while the MCA purports to require that, it also vested sole and unchallenged discretion in the President to determine what does and does not constitute a violation of the Conventions. After parading around as the righteous opponent of torture, McCain nonetheless endorsed and voted for the MCA, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. That law pretends to compel compliance with the Conventions, while simultaneously vesting the President with the power to violate them — precisely the power that the President is invoking here to proclaim that we have the right to use these methods.

The entire article is worth reading. There is no distinction between Bush and McCain on this issue, in fact they both use the same MO. McCain, who has built in credibility on the issue, talks a good game, but when push comes to shove he’s pro-torture as was, unfortunately, a large percentage of the Senate. The knew precisely what they were doing, just as they know what they’re doing with the latest telecom farce. Bush is against torture just like McCain. Just ask him. He’ll tell you that “We do not torture”.

On this issue the Times gets one thing right. The legislation that ultimately emerged from the Senate vested the president with the power to violate the law. What it got wrong was characterizing McCain as battling with the Administration. Had he really been battling he could actually have effectively stopped the authorization to torture, or made a damn good try at it, since he could have provided cover for the other cowards who caved on this issue. But he didn’t. Again from Greenwald’s column:

In 2005, McCain led the effort in the Senate to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which made the use of torture illegal. While claiming that he had succeeded in passing a categorical ban on torture, however, McCain meekly accepted two White House maneuvers that diluted his legislation to the point of meaningless: (1) the torture ban expressly applied only to the U.S. military, but not to the intelligence community, which was exempt, thus ensuring that the C.I.A.—the principal torture agent for the United States—could continue to torture legally; and (2) after signing the DTA into law, which passed the Senate by a vote of 90–9, President Bush issued one of his first controversial “signing statements” in which he, in essence, declared that, as President, he had the power to disregard even the limited prohibitions on torture imposed by McCain’s law.

McCain never once objected to Bush’s open, explicit defiance of his cherished anti-torture legislation, preferring to bask in the media’s glory while choosing to ignore the fact that his legislative accomplishment would amount to nothing. Put another way, McCain opted for the political rewards of grandstanding on the issue while knowing that he had accomplished little, if anything, in the way of actually promoting his “principles.”

A virtual repeat of that sleight-of-hand occurred in 2006, when McCain first pretended to lead opposition to the Military Commissions Act (MCA), only thereafter to endorse this most radical, torture-enabling legislation, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. After insisting that compelled adherence to the anti-torture ban of the Geneva Conventions was a nonnegotiable item for him, McCain ultimately blessed the MCA despite the fact that it left it to the President to determine, in his sole discretion, which interrogation methods did or did not comply with the Conventions’ provisions.

Thus, once again, McCain created a self-image as a principled torture opponent with one hand, and with the other, ensured a legal framework that would not merely fail to ban, but would actively enable, the President’s ability to continue using interrogation methods widely considered to be torture. Indeed, by casting himself as the Supreme Arbiter of torture morality, McCain’s support for this torture-enabling law became Bush and Cheney’s most potent instrument for legalizing the very interrogation methods that McCain, for so long, flamboyantly claimed to oppose.

Finally, on waterboarding, again from Greenwald:

And then this year, McCain voted to oppose a ban on waterboarding, claiming that it was unnecessary given that waterboarding is already considered illegal by the Bush administration — an assertion about which he later admitted he had no real knowledge and which is, in any event, simply untrue.

If McCain is really against waterboarding he has a funny way of showing it. It’s hard to see how McCain is mostly opposed to Bush on this issue. They both oppose torture. Just ask them. But still, somehow, torture happens.

I grow tired. Suffice it to say that the same pattern prevails on most of the issues on which McCain and Bush “mostly” disagree. The disagreements are largely rhetorical, and dissolve upon close analysis. The Times gives McCain the benefit of the doubt throughout, or just makes up differences (the windfall profits issue) where none exist.