A "Very Tall Order" For John W. McBush

The New York Times wrote this editorial today, including the following (it started out with some nice sound bites from McCain, though the Times rightly notes that they were likely spurred on by the coming electoral Repug disaster)...

Mr. McCain said he would achieve victory in Iraq by 2013, for instance, without a glimmer about how he would do it. The Democratic candidates know that the next president’s task will be to extricate the United States from an unwinnable situation as cleanly as possible, not to hold out for an impossible final victory.

His promise to respect the constitutional balance between Congress and the White House raised questions, too. Is he willing to find and fix all the ways that Mr. Bush has undermined the Constitution and abridged civil liberties? Or is he just promising to do better?

Mr. McCain’s record is not encouraging. His approval was critical to the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, one of the most damaging pieces of legislation in the nation’s history. It created kangaroo courts at Guantánamo and suspended habeas corpus, a prisoner’s fundamental right to a hearing in a real court.

Mr. McCain won some improvements in the bill’s provisions on the treatment of prisoners, but acquiesced to an appallingly cynical deal that exempted the intelligence agencies from a ban on the torture, abuse and humiliation of detainees.

Just talking about change is not enough. Look at the Republican Party’s witless attempt to repackage itself with a new Barack Obama-like sound bite, only to find that “The Change You Deserve” was the ad slogan for an antidepressant.

Mr. McCain’s speech highlighted some of the most egregious failures of the failed Bush presidency. But he needs to do much more to persuade the country that he has the ideas and the will to address them — and that his party, which refused to question Mr. Bush for seven long years, is really the one to change direction.

It is a very tall order.

Indeed (and here's more on that).