Neocon godfather Irving Kristol once famously said that "a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality." By that standard, the political right will need to coin an altogether new term to describe John McCain in the wake of the beating he has taken over the past several days. In the span of just […]
Category: Terrorism
Just one month after he took to the floor of the House to appropriate the memory of the late Tim Russert to push for offshore drilling, California Rep. Darrell Issa is at again. Rushing to defend former Attorney General John Ashcroft over charges that the Bush administration's practice of waterboarding detainees was tantamount to torture, […]
Just one month after airing an ad declaring "only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war," John McCain once again joked about creating carnage in Iran. On the stump Tuesday, McCain added killing Iranians with cigarette addiction to last year's musing about "bomb bomb Iran." Whether he's yukking it up over […]
The steady stream of bad news about Afghanistan this week served to highlight two inescapable truths regarding the conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. First, Barack Obama was right that the ongoing commitment of American forces in Iraq is preventing the United States from successfully pursuing Al Qaeda along the Pakistan frontier. Second, the […]
While a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland would be a tragedy for the American people, it would apparently be viewed as a blessing by the campaign of John McCain. On the same day that USA Today reported that terrorism is the only issue on which Americans clearly prefer John McCain to Barack Obama, McCain […]
Earlier this week, I detailed how John McCain, John Yoo and Justice Antonin Scalia in the wake of the Court's Boumediene decision all continued to peddle the discredited Republican talking point about "30 former Guantanamo detainees" who had "returned to the fight." Now a devastating new report released Tuesday from Seton Hall professor Mark Denbeaux […]
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Bush administration torture architect John Yoo thundered against the Supreme Court's restoration of habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees. Branding the Boumediene decision "judicial imperialism of the highest order," Yoo like Justice Scalia and John McCain raised the specter of those 30 released Gitmo terrorists as a warning […]
Just in case Republicans still wonder why the GOP routinely garners less than 10% of the African-American vote, the reactions of some of their leading lights to the Supreme Court's Guantanamo detainee decision should provide a quick reminder. While John McCain Friday simply called the Court's Boumediene ruling "one of the worst decisions in the […]
In the wake of the Supreme Court's restoration of habeas corpus rights in its Boumediene decision Friday, John McCain and his allies on the right have predictably forecast an American bloodbath at the hands of terrorists unleashed from Guantanamo. While Justice Antonin Scalia claimed the ruling would "almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," […]
During a town hall meeting in New Jersey on Friday, Republican presidential nominee John McCain reiterated his pledge to "get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice." Amazingly, McCain was able to make his promise without his signature line about following Bin Laden to "the gates of hell." Even more amazing, McCain cited swimming […]

