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You are here: Home / Ambition and moral degeneration

Ambition and moral degeneration

June 16, 2008 By Mark Kleiman @markarkleiman

John McCain of 1974 thought that sleep deprivation and stress positions are torture. John McCain of 2008 voted against forbidding them.

It’s sad that a man whose run for the Presidency is increasingly tied to his experience as a POW should have forgotten the one lesson he previously seemed to have learned: that torture is always and everywhere wrong. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.”

That’s entirely separate from the problem that some of the people being tortured at Gitmo weren’t even our enemies (until the Bush Administration decided to torture them). Some were merely turned in by their neighbors, for money or for spite, like Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Christo.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: John McCain, Torture

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