Let me preface this by saying: A lot of people who don't particularly agree with John McCain's political leanings nonetheless respect him. I am one of those people. As a former POW, he has an awful lot of moral authority on the issue of torture, and it's particularly important given that he belongs to the same party as the president and attorney general who have repeatedly claimed that there's some magical line between "torture" and "intensive interrogation tactics," and that they can toe that line as much as they like without violating international law or the minimum standard for decent humanity. McCain's been good on this issue in the past and I love him for it.

But this makes me start to question that:

But on Wednesday, when the Senate voted on the intelligence bill, which includes a provision that effectively bans waterboarding from being used as an interrogation technique by all 16 intelligence agencies, McCain voted against the bill.

[...]

In a statement, McCain said the measure goes too far in applying military standards to intelligence agencies and maintained that existing law already forbids waterboarding. "Staging a mock execution by including the misperception of drowning is a clear violation,'' he said.

But the U-turn in Wednesday's vote by the captain of the Straight Talk Express comes in the wake of the Bush administration suggesting that waterboarding remains a "legal" tactic that they reserve the right to use if circumstances warrant it.

As with most votes in Congress, there are typically legitimate reasons to oppose a bill that contains a few legitimate provisions, or to vote for a bill that contains one or two objectionable things. If Ted Stevens attached a million dollars in funding for an airlift that carried spawning salmon upstream by helicopter since it's too damn hard for them to swim up the river to a bill providing universal dental care to all gappy-toothed kids, it would be reasonable to hold your nose and vote yes. So I'm certainly not going to categorically conclude that McCain would personally waterboard some poor Gitmo inmate if he got the chance. But I can't say that I'm particularly convinced by his explanation. I think he's right that current law, correctly interpreted, forbids waterboarding - but the current law is clearly not being correctly interpreted by the people who put it into practice, and at that point it becomes the Congress' job to unambiguously clarify it.

You'd think that now that McCain has the nomination pretty well sealed up,he could stop pandering to the base and keep doing those things that make him appealing to independents in the first place, like bucking the party line and opposing torture. Oh. And good public policy, too - not to mention principles and all that jazz. But there must be something about traveling around the country and pandering to Republicans that gets to your head. Sorry, Mac.