Slacker Friday - Alterman

[dArKeR]

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA

"And it follows that the revered Senator McCain, who has been declaring that he wants all the remaining photos released, is acting like a posturing, media-mad fool."
-- Mickey Kaus  5/12/04    

Doc --
And, it follows, of course, Mickey is blogging like a college sophomore who discovered Ripple and Sun Tzu an hour ago.  But, we digress.

And, anyway, after this week, to paraphrase the young comedy writer from My Favorite Year, I need John McCains as big as I can get them.

Admittedly, it did not begin well; I did not need to hear McCain on the radio telling Sean (Knocko) Hannity that the latter was doing "God's work."  (For pity's sake, Senator, God's got enough trouble.)  However, as the week went along, he stepped up time and again.  As the incomparable Daily Howler pointed out yesterday, the senator even fed something back to Hannity himself concerning the God's work that Knocko had done in smearing McCain on behalf of C-Plus Augustus back in 2000.

Elsewhere, McCain grilled that Cambone character to a fine medium-well.  He walked out on the revolting Senator Jim Imhofe (R-Plankton).  Then, on Tuesday night, talking with Ted Koppel, he single-handedly redeemed Nightline, which otherwise spent the week looking down from a very great height upon The Shark.  On Tuesday, McCain was preceded by a filmed report that seemed designed as an apologia for the indiscretion of reading all those dead people's names last week.  It was all about how the murder of Nick Berg had put the prisoner scandal into perspective, and how Pat Roberts had read the dispatch in close to real time in the hearing room, and some more raving from Imhofe, and a lot of ends-justifying-means thumb-sucking. (Which was followed up the next night by a show on the theme "How Much Torture Should We Allow?" which included a package in which the views of Michael Ignatieff were paired off with those of the producer of Fox's "24."  Nice.)  Then McCain came on and threw a bucket of cold water on the whole parade, arguing that torture is, pretty much, well, torture, no matter under which flag it is inflicted.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/