Some super news from Super Tuesday

In all the excitement over Super Tuesday, one crucial development should not be overlooked: the crushing defeat of Mitt Romney in California, coupled with the withdrawal of Rudy Guliani from the race last week, marks the demise of the last of the pro-torture candidates and the end of the USA’s long national flirtation with neofascism. That is excellent news and we ought to take a moment to celebrate it.

Romney is effectively out and it is highly unlikely that Huckabee will be able to gather enough support to pose a credible challenge John McCain so late in the day. The odds must be about 99 to 1 in favor of our next president being either Clinton, Obama or McCain. All three are clearly opposed to torture.

McCain has stated his position eloquently:

To prevail in this war we need more than victories on the battlefield. This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas. They inevitably become public, and when they do they threaten our moral standing, and expose us to false but widely disseminated charges that democracies are no more inherently idealistic and moral than other regimes. This is an existential fight, to be sure. If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort.
(snip)
I've been asked often where did the brave men I was privileged to serve with in North Vietnam draw the strength to resist to the best of their abilities the cruelties inflicted on them by our enemies. They drew strength from their faith in each other, from their faith in God and from their faith in our country. Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them unto death. But every one of us-every single one of us-knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them. That faith was indispensable not only to our survival, but to our attempts to return home with honor. For without our honor, our homecoming would have had little value to us. Link.

I don’t believe that McCain will win, and I much prefer Clinton or Obama, but McCain’s emergence as the clear Republican frontrunner is a gratifying development that ought to be noted, not so much for what it promises as for what it prevents. As a bonus, McCain is rational on immigration reform too.

On the other three big issues--the war, the economy, and healthcare—McCain is just plain wrong and he is therefore considerably inferior as a potential President to either Clinton or Obama, but his two out of five score is infinitely preferable to the zero out of five pledged by Giuliani and Romney. We have at least been delivered from the nightmarish scenario of spending four more years sliding toward the abyss. Republican voters gave the finger to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck et al, and for them that is surely a large step in the right direction.

Crossposted to Daily Kos