McCain shows his true colors

In democratic circles, John McCain is often considered to be fairly tolerable (for a republican), and is sometimes thought to be somewhat “like us”, since he has had some public disagreements with Bush’s policies.

At the RNC yesterday, however, most of this went out the window, at least as far as I’m concerned. McCain made a clear jab at Michael Moore (which Moore seemed to take pretty well) in the midst of his praise of the Bush regime’s foreign policy mess:

“Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker […] who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.”

Frankly, I’m beginning to get pretty tired of this sort of straw-man argument where the liars of the right claim that anyone who questions Bush’s policies is actually a big Saddam supporter. When has Moore, or any liberal for that matter, ever claimed that “Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace” or anything similar? On the contrary, well-informed liberals have been critical of Saddam since the 70’s and 80’s, since even before the time when the Gipper sent Rummy to shake the old bastard’s hand and sell him some weapons.