Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Here's what Harriet Christian and women like her are planning to vote for this fall:

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

McCain's new tack towards the Bush administration's theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies' cooperation with President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, before he'd support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.

As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation's telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.

But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush's longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration's analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.

McCain's new position plainly contradicts statements he made in a December 20, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe where he implicitly criticized Bush's five-year secret  end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Yes, I AM picking on Harriet Christian as the official spokeswoman of the Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face Society, and I'm going to continue to do so right up until election day. Because it's one thing to be disappointed when your candidate doesn't quite make it. After all, when John Kerry and Dick Gephardt tag-teamed Howard Dean out of the race in 2004, I was so depressed I could hardly get out of bed for three weeks. But I never once said I was going to vote for the re-election of George W. Bush as revenge, because I knew that the obvious response to such a ridiculous notion would have been "Revenge against whom?"

John McCain is an extremely dangerous man. He's at least as dangerous as George W. Bush, and quite possibly more so. He clearly has anger management problems that are worse than Bush's; no less a conservative icon than Jack Kemp has called him "unstable" and "too dangerous to be president." Chris Matthews can cling to a few pre-2008-campaign McCain votes all he wants to and continue to hammer the "He's a maverick" meme, but John McCain is no moderate and he's no maverick. He's yet another short man with a Napoleon complex, issues about his father, and a chip on his shoulder that he's just daring someone to knock off. When we call him "McSame", there's a reason for it. Just because a man served in the military and did time as a prisoner of war doesn't give him a free pass on eviscerating the United States Constitution.

Of course the Republicans will vote for him. Some independents who are of the hiding-under-the-bed-with duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting variety will vote for him because they're still frightened. But there is absolutely no excuse for anyone with enough of a brain in her head to support an intelligent women in the primaries to help a guy like this gain the keys to the nuclear suitcase.