There's an excellent article today by Aaron Belkin in the Huffington Post.
In it, he disects McCain's supposedly "principled" opposition to repeal of DADT and exposes it as "anything but". As Belkin puts it:
Senator John McCain, leader of efforts to block the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," took pains during recent Senate hearings to disavow the possibility that he might be motivated by prejudice.
...
He insists that he has nothing against gay people, yet at the same time, there is something about them that would compromise the armed forces.
Follow me after the jump for a short rundown of the five reasons he gives....
It's not a very long article, so I recommend reading it in full. He does a pretty good job of taking McCain to task.
There are at least five indications that Senator McCain is not telling the truth, and that his true motivation is prejudice:
(In order to stay within fair use guidelines, I'm including only his five points--the comments in parentheses are my abbreviated version of his larger text.)
- Shifting goalposts. (Every time one of his arguments is disproved, he moves on to another one--typical wingnuttia.)
- Contradictions. (I kind of disagree with this heading--Belkin says that McCain complains about the Senate "wasting valuable time" on DADT while demanding that Congress wait until next year to hold more hearings. I would call this "bait and switch" instead.)
- Smokescreens. (McCain criticizes the 28% response rate of the Pentagon survey, even though it's about average for military surveys.)
- Cherry-picking the evidence. (He inflates the importance of the higher percentage of combat troops who "think that repeal would undermine their unit's cohesion".)
- Misrepresenting public concerns. (We've all seen the most recent polling that places public support for repeal at around 75%.)
Belkin concludes:
So if you hear Republican senators including John McCain talking about the need for more research (after 17 years), rushed deliberations (after a ten-month Pentagon study), unfair amendment processes (after two years of obstruction) or risks to unit cohesion (after 92% of troops who serve with gays said that no harm resulted), there's just one word that should pop up in your mind: prejudice.
Angry old man shakes fist at clouds--News at 11.