John McCain

John McCain's says of the passage of his anti-torture amendment:

I think that this will help us enormously in winning the war for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world in the war on terror.

The hearts and minds? Where have I heard that before?

McCain has two qualities that I find repellent. One is that he takes things too personally. When he was caught up in the Keating scandal, he seemed to feel that he could not cleanse himself of the taint until he had gotten legislation through to take money out of politics. Most people recognize that to be a pointless exercise. Like trying to drain the oceans. Now he has taken the charges of torture lodged against the U.S. as some kind of personal slur.

The other quality is that he has a naive faith in the power of legislation to change human nature and solve every problem. That is a trait I associate with liberals and Democrats, not conservatives and Republicans. George Bush is accused of being simple and unsophisticated, but I think McCain is more that way than Bush. Bush knows that much of what the media and academia tell us constantly is illusion, that we can have peace just by wishing for it and refusing to stand up to those who hate us for no good reason; that if we just showed them our good faith they would abandon all their attempts to destroy us, that we can eliminate poverty by giving everybody what they want.

His amendment muddies the water by promising to treat detainees in a way that we can never fulfill. By including "degrading" treatment with "cruel and inhuman," he has given the left more grounds for denouncing our military and intelligence services, because these detainees have been trained to be uncivil, resistant, insulting, and to be so in a manner that is self-degrading. They will not cease to accuse their guards of all sorts of atrocities, or to provoke them with threats, throwing feces and urine at them, etc. How can they be treated that would not somehow be considered torture under this definition. If they were just kept in cages and never interviewed at all, that would be considered inhumane in that they are denied human company. The very condition of confinement is inhumane, but some people leave the rest of us no choice.
We do ourselves and the world no good by passing laws that can never be complied with because everybody who reads them can interpret them differently. What, for example, does "shocks the conscience" mean? Whose conscience? Senator McCain's or Saddam Hussein's?

James Taranto describes McCain's statement as "fatuous." Indeed.