I agree with the substance of most of what Glenn Greenwald says, but his overdramatic style can get really irritating. For instance, the sub-headline here: John McCain has done more to enable and legalize torture than *any* other political figure in the U.S.? More than the many Republican Senators who are even less qualified in their support of the torture regime than McCain? More than Alberto Gonzales? More than Dick Cheney? More than George W. Bush himself? Really.

I don't think that this article *does* lay out the case that John McC *is* the most responsible guy in the country, it just points out the myriad ways in which he has been complicit through inaction, or knowingly weak action, in the establishment of the torture regime. But is this any less true of say, Susan Collins? It's true that many in the mainstream media view McCain as having special "Moral Authority"--and not without some reason, I suppose, since he is in fact the only member of Congress who has undergone torture--but this status bears no legal or procedural weight.

Your real argument, I think, is that precisely because of this special "Moral Authority," John McCain has more responsibility than the average Senator to work against the legalization of torture in this country, and I absolutely agree with this. Indeed, McCain's complicitness and hedging on this issue has been the most disappointing (to me) aspect of his contemptible embracing of the far right of his party. What John McCain really is is the guy who *could have done the most to stop the legalization of torture* (within the Senate, at least--I think "in the US" is still a stretch).

Failure to act, and even complicitness, however, are *not* the same as proactively pursuing the legalization and implementation of torture by agents of the U.S. government, as many members of the executive branch have done. For this reason your claim that John McCain ranks first in the entire U.S. political establishment in legalizing torture is indeed over-the-top (although, unless you were actually breathing so hard while writing that the carbon dioxide levels in your blood became depleted, it was not hyperventilating). And that over-the-top exagerration does make it easier, I think, for reasonable people to dismiss the good points you have to make. Since I'd really like the Democrats to win, I don't want people to ignore your valid points about McCain's unfitness to be president.

A simple thought-experiment may suffice to disprove your argument: Take a time machine back to late 2001/early 2002 when the torture business all began, and abduct the one individual (being virtuous sorts, we will deposit them in Tahiti where they may frolic harmlessly in the tropics in perpetuity) who you believe will, in the following 7 years, be most responsible for the enabling and legalization of torture. Do you abduct John McCain? I think not.

It's worth mentioning the curiosity that despite always voting Republican in the presidential elections, Indiana elects Democratic Governors and Senators with quite a bit of frequency--Evan Bayh was Governor before he was Senator (and was elected to that post way back in 1998), and his father Birch was a Senate Democrat from the early 60s through the early 80s.

In response to a question about Cone being in near-agreement with Malcolm X when Malcolm called the white man "the devil," Walton states:

"When Cone employed the terms "whiteness" and "blackness" in his theological interpretation of the Gospel narratives according to the lived realities of African-Americans in the American context, he was referring to them not as a physical descriptive category but as a cultural notion and spiritual concepts . . ."

The spinning and twisting Walton goes to to avoid denouncing this is a racist sentiment is quite astonishing. I think that the real answer is that Cone and some other black theologians/thinkers (both within and without the Christian tradition), rather justifiably embittered by the pervasive and systemic racism that obtained in the United States in which they lived, became so consumed with anger and frustration that they themselves swallowed the racist bile and spit it back out in reversed form. The perversion of Christ's message into a theology that justifies viewing any group of people as superior or inferior to another, based on something as silly as their skin color, is one of the more pernicious and tragic legacies of trans-Atlantic slavery--and it is no less pernicious, and perhaps even more tragic, when voiced by the victims of the system and their descendants.

Somebody who agrees with the statement "the white man is the devil" is agreeing with a racist statement, and denying this is an exercise in apologism--just as many on the right engage in astonishing exercise of spin and tap-dancing to deny that various white evangelical preachers are not hate-filled bigots.

The theory goes that the GOP, incapable of competing with the Democrats on the issues, use their Sinister Attack Machine (to use Greenwald-style Dramatic Capitals) to drown out substance in a flood of triviality and personal attack. So why did this work in 1988, 2000, and 2004 but not 1992 or 1996? I think that the state of the economy at the time of these elections plays at least as important a role as GOP tactics. The economy was relatively strong in 1988 and, despite Greenwald's protestations, Reagan and Bush were not entirely unpopular (a 19% disapproval rating for GHWB?). In contrast, the economy was much weaker in 1992, which is what bled dry the enormous political capital senior Bush had amassed as a result of the successful conduct of the First Gulf War. Moreover, Clinton won *on the issues* because his economic ideas, in particular, wer emore appealhing to American voters than those of his opponent. This is not to deny that the GOP employs the kind of tactics Greenwald describes, and that they do this to a much greater and more pernicious degree than the Democrats as a general rule, but it *is* to deny that the GOP attack machine is an all-powerful juggernaut that has the mass media enthusiastically in its corner.