Steve Sailer makes jokes:

Why is John McCain in Colombia? The most reassuring theory I can come up with is that McCain intends to bring back a couple of sixty pound suitcases that the Secret Service will hustle for him through Customs. And soon Obama’s big lead in campaign finance will have vanished. And there won’t be anymore questions about McCain being too old to have the energy for the job as he starts campaigning 96 hours straight.

On the other hand, there are more alarming interpretations, such as that McCain is taking a serious interest in the geopolitical situation in Northern South America — i.e., he wants to get us involved in a war there.

Given John McCain’s legendary openness to the press, one might think that someone on the “straight talk express” would want to ask McCain which Latin American states, if any, fall under the scope of his “rogue state rollback” scheme. Cuba, presumably. But also Venezuela? Bolivia?

Senator Mitch McConnell and Heritage Institute President Edwin Feulner both praise Jesse Helms for a career of work on behalf of “free markets and free people.” Of course, if you were a right-wing Latin American dictator, Helms was also for you. For example, Alex Massie reminds us of Helms’ support for Argentinian aggression against the Falklands Islands:

“The tilt toward Britain will destroy the coalition we must have if we are to prevent a Communist takeover of Central America,” said North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, the lone opponent of a Senate resolution endorsing a pro-British policy.

Elsewhere in Republican presidents thankfully not being nearly as crazy or stupid as Helms in national security matters, he also “condemned President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to Beijing as ‘appeasing Red China.’”

Condoleezza Rice is “proud of the decision” to invade Iraq. This kind of sentiment, which John McCain has of course echoed, not only reveals a strange attitude toward the wisdom of the decision to invade but a profound gap in strategic judgment between mainstream American conservatives and normal people.

If conservatives want to argue that Barack Obama’s been flip-flopping on Iraq, I’ll disagree but I could see what they mean. Charles Krauthammer, however, can’t seriously believe that Obama’s been “assiduously obliterat[ing] all differences with McCain on national security and social issues” since the end of the primaries.

Consider such non-obscure points as John McCain is pro-life and has said he wants to appoint judges who will restrict abortion rights, whereas Barack Obama is pro-choice. John McCain favors an amendment to California’s constitution that would take back gay and lesbian couples’ newfound marriage rights whereas Barack Obama opposes such an amendment. Barack Obama opposes a permanent American military presence in Iraq whereas John McCain favors it. Barack Obama thinks torture is wrong even when the CIA does it, whereas John McCain thinks it’s great for the CIA to torture people. Barack Obama favors good-faith high-level negotiations with Iran, whereas John McCain wants to “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” One could go on, but it hardly seems necessary — the only question is why The Washington Post thinks it’s a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way.

Kevin Drum says Bush’s lawbreaking on FISA is different from what Richard Nixon did with surveillance because Bush wasn’t abusing surveillance for partisan or personal gains. To which I say: How do we know? The Washington Post published an editorial slamming opponents of retroactive telecom immunity that made the following pseudo-argument:

No one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored. The likelihood of prevailing — or even getting very far — with such lawsuits is low. The litigation seems aimed as much at using the tools of discovery to dislodge information about what the administration actually did as it is at redressing unknown injuries.

Benjamin Friedman observes that “you have to wonder why the Post thinks that dislodging information about an illegal wiretapping programs is nefarious.” Meanwhile I have to wonder why so much of the elite press is so absolutely certain all this illegal surveillance was undertaken in good faith when, in fact, we have no idea what happened and the administration has been trying very hard to make sure we never do.