AMY GOODMAN We’re talking about the front runner for the Republican nomination and he is John McCain. Our guest is Matt Welch, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. He’s joining us from Washington D.C. He was a former editor at the Los Angeles Times. John McCain, who says he would be fine if the US military stayed in iraq for 100 years, responding to a question at a town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire on January third.

         AUDIENCE MEMBER: President Bush is talking about our staying in Iraq for 50 years–

         SEN. JOHN McCAIN: –Maybe 100.

        AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is that what he said?

         SEN. JOHN McCAIN: –We have been in South Korea, we have been in Japan for 60 years, we have been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans– as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day.

AMY GOODMAN That is John McCain in New Hampshire. I want to go to one of the clips where he speaks out against torture. He himself, a P.O.W. in Vietnam. This was John McCain speaking several years ago, November 2005.

         SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Torture does not work. The Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 said that the Israelis could not torture or practice cruel or inhumane treatment on the people they take prisoner. The israeli defense officials who I have discussed this with say that it doesn’t work, and they use psychological techniques. And so– One, it does not work. Two, is so damaging to us in an image fashion. And three, the next conflict we are in, the government will use that same rationale to inflict serious injury to Americans who may become captive.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Welch you wrote the biography of John McCain, “McCain: The Myth of a Maverick,” talk about his position on torture.

MATT WELCH: It’s one of the things about McCain that I personally find most endearing or most hopeful in imagining him being the next president. Although, you know, I cannot believe we are at a period in our country where we are surprised that there’s someone running for president who is against torture? I don’t really know how that happened. But anyways, McCain was tortured and so were all of his comrades in Vietnam. And as anyone who has seen torture upfront can testify, they will make to say things that are not true-–so you can get rid of the pain. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

He has, several times in his career, because of his military background, his country first party second, background, and also because, you know, he has always been kind of the class clown and pop off, he is willing to bluntly speak his mind. It’s one of the reasons why Americans find him endearing. On torture, he is very happy to tell his Republican colleagues to go fly a kite.

That said, his bill last year trying to eliminate torture ended up eliminating habeas corpus sort of by accident on the back end. And so, you know, as often happens, with McCain in particular, he had a great idea, his “heart was in the right place.” And the legislative result of that was not necessarily something that worked out to the nation’s benefit. But yes, he has been a great and eloquent defender of the heretofore American notion that our standards of keeping—taking care of our prisoners of war will be better or at least at the highest of universal standards. For that, he should be commended or just recognized that he does not want to build two guantanamos.

AMY GOODMAN: What–

MATT WELCH: –He wants to close Guantanamo and some other things. Yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Why do entitle your book The Myth of a Maverick?

MATT WELCH: Because, basically my book is an attempt to sketch out-–it is an ideological portrait. It is an attempt to figure out, what does this guy believe about the nature of government? How did he come about those beliefs? How will that look like in the presidency, in the white house?

Before you get to any of that, you have to peel back all of these incredible layers of mythology that have happened– been erected around him by a largely adoring press. He is probably the most adored Republican by the media of the last 25 years, if not 30 or 40. It is astonishing how much he is liked. He has been given endorsements in something like 90% of the top newspapers in the country that have endorsed Republicans in the primaries.

So, I mean, just the idea that he is a big man of the people, totally mythological. He is very much an elitist in stead. The idea that he is some kind of a preternatural straight talker, this is not true. If you look at all at his record and including his daily comportment on the campaign trail, just last week, he was basically sliming Mitt Romney, who you know, has plenty of reasons to be slimed, as being some sort of cut and run anti-surge candidate. Anyone who looked into that realized that is a pretty scurrilous charge.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about his relationship with the president– with George Bush?

MATT WELCH: It’s an interesting and tortured one, you know? McCain was– not only was he running against Bush, but he was running against Bush very much as an insurgent in 2000. The Republican establishment had coalesced around Bush, and McCain and his backers– largely who are neoconservatives and surrounded the Weekly Standard Magazine, in particular, Bill Kristol and David Brooks. They were speaking a language of Teddy Roosevelt and third parties, this is an insurgency and maybe the Republican party will get blown up in the process. It was a very kind of high wire and thrilling act, and one reason why a lot of people glommed onto it. They saw that he was standing up and having daily “sister soldier” moments with the right. He was calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agents of intolerance and these kind of things. So he ran this sort of very insurgent campaign, playing star wars music, you know? And George Bush was Darth Vader and McCain was Luke Skywalker. And then Bush croaked him in South Carolina in a pretty vicious campaign. I don’t know if it was any more vicious than your standard vicious campaign– but then McCain went and sulked basically for a year and a half.

There was a lot of talk, we forget about it now, but there was a lot of talk in 2001 especially of– is McCain going to defect and go to the Democratic Party? He got very interested in campaign finance, which is largely a democratic initiative. He became much more interested in global warming and regulatory issues, which are more traditionally democratic. And you know there were plenty of articles about both him and the Weekly Standard people and neoconservatives in general in late 2001, before September 11th, saying “Hey look, you know, they’re basically going to be democrats this time next year.” Well, September 11th changed all that.

The basic McCain strategy– you know in 1999 McCain advocated this policy of rogue-state rollback which is basically preemptive war three and a half years before Bush ever thought of it.

AMY GOODMAN: He threatened North Korea with extinction.

MATT WELCH: He threatened North Korea with extinction, and he elucidated this doctrine by which– wherever there is an authoritarian dictator, we support the insurgents. And, if we support the insurgent and the dictator cracks down, then we have to defend the insurgents with US force. And any time we make a threat and someone calls our bluff, we also have to use US force. It is incredibly interventionist militaristic approach towards foreign policy that he has had all along. That’s the reason why neoconservatives have flocked to his cause and championed it over the years.

So, after September 11th, Bush started to embrace those ideas. That kind of policy structure grafted onto Bush and so it was natural that McCain and Bush would become closer over that time. And then– starting around 2004 and 2005, when McCain started eyeing the presidency in 2008, he began this long, slow suck-up to the right, particularly social conservatives, and also to Bush because he wanted to be the sort of front runner of the Republican establishment.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened around this period when, well, John McCain started singing.

MATT WELCH: –You know–

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll go to the song.

MATT WELCH: –Are you playing the song now?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

       *You know that old Beach Boys song “Bomb Iran?” [laughter] "Bomb, bomb, bomb– anyway. [laughter]

AMY GOODMAN: What about that, Matt Welch?

MATT WELCH: That was I believe last February or March or something like that, mid January. Look, this is his idea of humor. He does have a kind of blunt and ribald occasionally awful sense of humor. But it speaks also to his policy ideas.

Whenever he talks about Vladimir Putin, who is no friend of mine certainly, but when he talks about him on the campaign trail, he says, “I look into his eyes and I see three letters—K.G.B.” He is constantly rattling sabers in the general direction of everybody. Of China, Russia, certainly of North Korea. At any given time, he considers this or that dictator or authoritarian or kind of mean guy to be the transcendent issue that we must focus on this very moment. It is the only sort of lever or– the only sort of grade that he knows to approach the world’s problems, which is “identify evil everywhere and get in evil’s face”.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Welch, we just have 60 seconds. I want to know what brought him back from the edge of extinction. Just a few months ago, he fired his staff, had no money, to being the front runner. Do you expect him to win Super Tuesday?

MATT WELCH I do expect him to win Super Tuesday because the G.O.P. is coalescing around a front runner which is what they usually do. He came back because everybody else made such terrible choices. Rudy Giuliani made a terrible choice to run a late-state strategy, Mitt Romney made an, I think, interesting choice of trying to impersonate a social conservative, which left a real social conservative room to kneecap him in Iowa, which is what Mike Huckabee did. Fred Thompson never really ran an energetic campaign. And suddenly, McCain was able to focus on a retail politics state like New Hampshire and rely on all the free media he always gets by nature of who he is and basically survive without having to spend a lot of money, while the rest of his opponents did not attack him at all, they just treated him as a hero who was going to lose. One by one, they all knocked each other out and he ended up surviving.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Welch, I want to thank you for being with us. Editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. He is the author of the book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

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