More of the same

by John Schwenkler

Will e-mailed to ask if I had caught wind of the announcement that war crimes enhanced interrogation extra-special question-asking apologist Michael Goldfarb, who apparently thinks that wartime presidents are vested by the Constitution with "near-dictatorial powers", will serve as Deputy Communications Director for Team McCain. I had, and I told him I was speechless. Check that.

The fact is that, consonant with Mr. Goldfarb's wishes, I stopped reading the WS blog just as soon as he told me to, and so it was through Glenn Greenwald that the announcement first reached my desk. So you can make of that latter association what you wish. But as to the association originally in question, my feeling is that it is just the latest in a long string of happenings that should make it clear as day that John McCain does not represent a break from the "politics of the past", nor from the past's failed policies on matters foreign: he has been shrewdly successful, to be sure, in presenting himself as a responsible statesman who will undo the worst horrors of Bushism, but he is not that at all, and anyone who chooses to vote for him on such a basis is nothing short of a sucker. (I say this as someone who once held out hope that things were otherwise.) Bill Kristol is apparently hoping to weasel his colleague into a post as National Security Advisor, and while this is highly unlikely to say the least, the far more reasonable thought that the ever-eloquent Mr. Goldfarb might resurface in the more appropriately water-carrying role of Press Secretary to a (shudder) President McCain ought to be enough to turn one's vote elsewhere.