Senator John McCain, the most booked Sunday talk show guest has a big problem when it comes to the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap that President Obama signed off on. Originally he was all for the trade of prisoners back in February, but if you listen to him now, it's like that never ever happened. Scarce properly called him out over it by saying: The craven politics of John McCain are nothing new. They aren't, but what's just as frustrating is that CNN had the chance to question him on his new position, but failed to do so. Will the media ever call him on it?
On the February 18 edition of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, McCain explained that he was previously opposed to the idea of releasing the five Guantanamo prisoners in peace talks, but that he was now "inclined to support" a proposal that would release the men in exchange for Bergdahl. When Anderson asked for a second time, "if there was some -- the possibility of some sort of exchange, that's something you would support?" McCain reiterated his support:
COOPER: Would you oppose the idea of some form of negotiations or prisoner exchange? I know back in 2012 you called the idea of even negotiating with the Taliban bizarre, highly questionable.
MCCAIN: Well, at that time the proposal was that they would release -- Taliban, some of them really hard-core, particularly five really hard-core Taliban leaders, as a confidence- building measure. Now this idea is for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details.
[...]COOPER: So if there was some -- the possibility of some sort of exchange, that's something you would support?
MCCAIN: I would support. Obviously I'd have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing him home and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider.
He supported before he was against it. We really need television ombudsmen examining what politicians and pundits say on our airwaves. There are never any consequences, either for lying or for making believe you never said the thing that you said before.
Digby calls him Mr. Consistency:
“These are the hardest of the hard core. These are the highest high-risk people, and others that we have released have gone back into the fight,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in an interview on “Face the Nation,” adding that he was disturbed the Taliban named the prisoners they wanted in exchange for Bergdahl’s freedom.
“We need to know more information about the conditions of where they are going to be,” McCain added. “It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to reenter the fight.”
(…)For McCain, the chief concern is what will happen to the detainees once they are released.
“If they reenter the fight then it is going to put American lives at risk and none of us want that to happen…if they are able to have after a year in Qatar to do whatever they want to do there’s no doubt they will reenter the fight,” he said.
