McCain agrees with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Stop Gina Haspel!

I wonder if his next trick will be to officially switch parties. Everyone knows he did it in his heart long ago. Heck, why not? That he would oppose Haspel is less surprising than that would be, although McCain is usually pretty hawkish on foreign affairs. It’s just that he’s willing to fight, but not to fight to win, and he joins much of the Beltway in that he’d rather risk the lives of innocence than be a meanie to a terrorist. Here’s what he told Seung Min Kim of the Washington Post:

NEWS —> @SenJohnMcCain urges Senate to reject Gina Haspel for CIA pic.twitter.com/2nnn3naHzs

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 10, 2018

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McCain’s position doesn’t even make any sense. He acknowledges that the circumstances people like Haspel faced contained inherent moral dilemmas, and he calls her a patriot who is committed to the best interests of the country. But because she was taking actions permitted by the law at the time to stop future terror attacks, she has to be rejected? Why? For what? Haspel isn’t proposing to start torturing terrorists again (which is a shame if you ask me), and even McCain doesn’t question that her credentials are solid going forward – which is when she’d be leading the CIA, going forward, not in the past. But McCain is apparently concerned that if he doesn’t live much longer, he will run out of opportunities to stick his finger in Donald Trump’s eye, so he has to take every opportunity he can get now. Thus, Haspel must go down. Enough Democrats are coming around to her that she will probably be confirmed, but not before John McCain engages in a little moral preening. It is, after all, his specialty.

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