Aug 19, 2008 06:15 PM
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New York, 2:16 PM
Tue Feb 9
56 posts in the last 24 hours
You know how John McCain knew his captors were gay? The guards that bound him with ropes and beat him nightly for hours were wearing sweaters. Ha ha ha. No, seriously though, the actual funny new joke about John McCain is that he was not even tortured!
Andrew Sullivan argues that all the shit that happened to McCain—"sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating"—now falls under the category of perfectly legal enhanced interrogation, as practiced by the United States across the world. With McCain's approval! Hooray!
(Of course U.S. law requires that detainees are treated to one night of a guard quietly scratching a crescent into the sand every year on a holy day of their choosing.)
Oh, and no one yet knows when McCain first remembered the guard that drew the cross in the ground with a stick or why he did not mention this fact until 1999, but the story is not from Solzhenitsyn at all but rather from Watergate crook turned evangelical wingnut Chuck Colson, who claimed he heard it from Jesse Helms, who said he heard it from Billy Graham in 1977.
John McCain seems to have a habit of making up his own biography to fit whatever his circumstances require and then seeming like he believes his own nonsense. Maybe it relates to those years of torture, during which he'd only give up useless information to his captors, like the starting defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers (sorry, wait... that was the Packers.).
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
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