One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging, by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."

Both answers elicited approving roars from the blood-lusting South Carolina crowd, and it seemed only a matter of time before Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter pulled a car battery out from behind the podium and pledged himself ready to torture someone, anyone, right now, if it would win him red-state votes. But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. "If we torture people," he said sadly, "what happens to our military people when they're captured?" After the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of America's choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do you know where that was invented?" McCain asked. "In the Spanish Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish Inquisition?"

In the diffident silence you could almost feel McCain's poll numbers dropping toward the low single digits. I, for one, was impressed. It seems amazing to say, but in the Bush era, distancing oneself from the Spanish Inquisition actually qualifies as political courage. (my emphasis)