Re: ‘Detain McCain’

Steve Alber’s response to our post on John McCain, which is three items down in this column.

Whether or not John McCain has the right to run for president is really a point which, though moot, has already been decided in his favor, but I’m not sure by whom. The composition of his family, his formative years, his residence in Malaysia, etc. so doesn’t matter it’s not even funny.

What does matter is whether or not he supports and defends the Constitution … which you actually have to swear to do before you can get an American passport. I assume McCain has a passport, but he may have misspoken himself when he agreed to that admittedly minor stipulation. (What the passport folks really care about is getting your hundred bucks and making sure both your ears are visible in your passport picture.) Anyway, it’s hard to see how someone can claim to support the Constitution when he says “Amen!” to assholes like Alberto Gonzales who actually claim before a congressional committee that Americans have no right to habeas corpus.

This would be of no consequence if Gonzales were just some Texas yahoo who didn’t happen to be the Attorney General of the United States when he said, basically, “Fuck the Constitution. What George Bush wants is what’s important. At least that’s what Cheney told me to say.”

I’ll bet you if you pushed McCain, he’d also claim that the 10th Amendment trumps the rest of the Constitution, but that’s another issue. One can only hope that with the nonsense of people’s family history out of the way, we may have a civil debate about the issues.

Yeah, right.

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