John McCain’s sad crusade against gays

It’s sad to see Sen. John McCain, who once said he wasn’t necessarily opposed to repealing the U.S military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy banning gays from serving openly in our nation’s armed forces, reduced to being the U.S. Senate’s cranky bigot:

McCain first led the Republican filibuster against the annual defense authorization bill — which included language for repeal — in September. (And no, if Harry Reid had taken out the DREAM Act from the bill, McCain still would’ve led a filibuster. Because that’s exactly what he’s doing now that the DREAM Act has been stripped out.) Since then, the Pentagon has completed, released, and powerfully defended its 267-page report on the effects of implementation on soldiers’ morale, troop cohesion, readiness, et cetera, and found that the effects would be trivial. Defense secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen have stressed the need to include this repeal, rather than let the courts determine its future. Democrats appear ready to allow an open amendment process on the defense authorization bill when they bring it up again, just as Republicans asked for. And most importantly, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is a dumb, bizarre policy compromise hammered out 17 years ago, when the most of the country still thought of gays as surly witches wanting to kidnap everyone’s first-borns for a permanent vacation to their gay lofts in the ninth circle of Hell. Now gays are mostly known as “those delightful people in all the sitcoms.”

John McCain asked for more hearings after the report came out, and he got those. They’re starting today. He probably doesn’t want them to start so soon though, or ever, because the whole point of his rude, agonizingly transparent opposition is to run out the clock until the new Congress takes over and buries this uncontroversial repeal for another few years. The problem, see, is that it could excite many of the despondent voters who helped put Barack Obama in power a few years ago. These people need to remain sad! And keeping them sad forever is the only thing that gets John McCain out of bed every morning.

Remember that time that John McCain ordered his wife, a celebrity supporter of the repeal, to shut the hell up, because it was making him look bad? It was only a few weeks ago.

Yet again, John McCain has shown that he’s not a man of conviction and integrity….he’s simply an opportunist and a bigot.