McCain's Integrity and Andrew Sullivan

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem."
--Abraham Lincoln
"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
--William Shakespeare

Today, the daddy is feeling a recent post (September 10, 2008) by Andrew Sullivan. As many of you know, Sullivan writes on a blog called "The Daily Dish." Now, Sullivan says on his blog that he belongs to no party or clique, but it's clear that he was a supporter of Sen. John McCain and, like Arianna over at the Huffington Post, has been very disappointed by McCain's below-the-belt 2008 campaign.

This brings the daddy to Sullivan's post where he talks about the guy he admired for his willingness to go against his party, walk across the isle and get some much-needed senate bill passed for the country. He talked about a guy who would not only provide engaging conversation but discuss policy that could move the country forward. Sullivan let us know that this was the McCain on "The Straight Talk Express" of long ago and that the candidate McCain of 2008 has sold his soul to a devil named Karl Rove, a homophobic, anti-Catholic and rapture-loving minister named Hagee and and the right wing of a party that has nothing left to offer the country but fear mongering and smear tactics. Sullivan states:

"For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.

And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.

He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism."

Later, Sullivan concludes:

"McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable."

This is pretty strong stuff from a conservative, but it shouldn't be surprising. Sen. McCain has already demonstrated that he has no integrity left. On the other hand, the Sullivan just demonstrated that he does.

He's not the only one.
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Note: Thanks to Craig over at Fumbling Toward Divinity for
inspiring me to write this post.