<p>“Oh, that and the fact that he got on this moral high-horse about torture, as if just because he was tortured by the (peaceful, kind, loving, and who never attacked us, remember?) Vietnamese, this somehow gives him the right to equate what he and his comrades went through to a pair of underwear on someone’s head.”</p>
<p>I would submit that John McCain is one of the few politicians we have who DOES have the right to speak on torture. The rest of these chicken-hawks certainly do not.</p>
<p>"For example, Sen. McCain wants $10 million ($2 million annually over five years) to establish the William H. Rehnquist Center on Constitutional Structures and Judicial Independence at the University of Arizona.</p>
<p>Yeah. That’s good use of public funds."</p>
<p>The William H. Rehnquist Center on Constitutional Structures and Judicial Independence is to focus on scholarship and education about the judicial branch of government. Boy, we sure don’t want anyone at a law school to know anything more about the judiciary than they already do. </p>
<p>“GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to “change the tone in Washington” and ran for office as a moderate, a “compassionate conservative,” in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a “base” that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist’s phrase, “drown it in the bathtub.” That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them"partial birth” abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It’s not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it’s unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush’s former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once said, “What you’ve got is everythingand I mean everythingbeing run by the political arm.” "</p>
<p>As far as Clinton goes, keep in mind he left his second term in office with a 65% approval rating from the American People, AFTER Monica and AFTER the Conservatives led an impeachment. That was the highest end of term approval rating since Eisenhower. Reagan’s was 64%.</p>
<p>Conservatism ain’t what it used to be.</p>