A top lawyer for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign said telecommunications companies should be forced to explain their role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program as a condition for legal immunity for past wiretapping, a statement that stands in marked contrast to positions taken by President Bush, McCain and other Republicans in Congress.
“There would need to be hearings, real hearings, to find out what actually happened, what harms actually occurred, rather than some sort of sweeping of things under the rug,” Chuck Fish, a former vice president and chief patent counsel at Time Warner, said last week at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven, Conn., according to an audiotape available on the conference Web site. “That would be absolutely verboten in a McCain administration.”
Were laws broken, and if they were, why haven’t people been arrested? Oh, right – it’s just more liberal grandstanding. Way to go, Mav!! How again is his collectivist administration going to be different from a Democratic collectivist administration? Oh, right – in a McCain administration the hearings would be real, not playing dressup in the basement. That’s just peachy.
Every day, I try to find reasons to vote for McCain. And every day, I learn another reason not to. (And I write this in the full confidence that he’s not going to repudiate Fish or what Fish said, although he may try to weasel out of it. But repudiate it, with the energy he expended on smacking Hagee down? No. Not gonna happen.)
