In 1954, an attorney named Joseph Welch drew in a breath, and in four sentences brought down one of the most dangerous men of the 20th century, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

In defending a member of his law firm whom McCarthy had decided to publicly – and wrongly – condemn as a communist, Welch uttered the now famous words, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough…Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Senator McCarthy’s career, for all intents and purposes, ended at that moment. Within months he had been censured by the Senate. He left office, began drinking heavily, and was dead three years later.

Skip ahead to the present day. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, now the president of The New School in New York City, this year invited Senator John McCain – widely touted as a frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential race in 2008 – to be the school’s 2006 graduation speaker.

A student at The New School, Jean Rohe, was also scheduled to speak. She discovered that Senator McCain planned to deliver the same speech to the New School graduates that he had given at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University several days earlier. Ms. Rohe researched the oratory online, and discovered that it was nothing more than a thinly disguised stump speech, supporting a number of governmental initiatives that Ms. Rohe found personally repugnant.

Since she was scheduled to speak before Senator McCain, Rohe decided that her presentation would be very powerful if it preempted many of McCain’s points, rebutting them even before they were made!

Facing a crowd that greeted McCain with a huge banner and flyers that read “Our Commencement Is Not Your Platform”, Rohe made three main points specifically crafted to take the bite out of McCain’s comments.

First, she agreed with him that “…dissent and disagreement are our ‘civic and and moral obligation’ in a time of crisis”.

Second, she stated unequivocally (and - I might add both editorially and parenthetically – correctly) that “preemptive war is dangerous and wrong, that George Bush’s agenda in Iraq is not worth the many lives lost…”.

Finally, she addressed McCain’s contention that “Americans have nothing to fear from each other”, by maintaining that we have nothing to fear at all. Fear, she contended, drives us to invade and destroy the lives of others. Her point, by way of interpretation, appears to have been that the Administration has used fear as a tool to control public opinion, to justify its military adventures in the Middle East, and to drown out voices of - as McCain referred to them – “disagreement and dissent”.

To say that Mr. McCain was irritated would be an understatement. He amended his comments to congratulate Rohe – somewhat deprecatingly – for her “Cliff Notes version of my speech”. Despite this, Rohe made a point of meeting with him after the ceremony to tell him, “I’m sorry, man. I just had to do it.”

According to Rohe, McCain half-heartedly reassured her that it was all right. However, he later commented in the New York Times on the event, stating “I feel sorry for people living in a dull world where they can't listen to the views of others…"

Senator McCain’s meaning is obvious. He feels sorry for people who won’t sheepishly knuckle under to his updated NeoCon blather.

It seems that McCain has done something of an about-face over the last several years, sliding ever-steadily and inexorably to the Right, attempting to curry favor with NeoCon fat cats and Carlyle Group kingmakers. His recent public rimjob of the very Axis of Fascist Evil, Jerry Falwell, is only the latest indicator of McCain’s true stripes.

In 2000, McCain – then on the campaign trail for the presidential nomination – referred to Falwell as an “agent of intolerance”. Sounded good to me, though my terms for Falwell lean somewhat more to the scatologically anatomical (look it up). However, in a Meet The Press interview with Tim Russert last month, you could barely hear what he was saying over the ‘beep…beep…beep’ backup sound coming from somewhere behind him.

Russert confronted McCain with this statement he made in 2000: “Gov. Bush swung far to the right and sought out the base support of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Those aren’t the ideas that I think are good for the Republican Party.”

McCain then backed away from that statement, claiming that “the Christian Right has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is because they’re so active and their followers are.”

In other words, they vote with their wallets and checkbooks, and the Campaign Beast Must Be Fed. McCain is completely comfortable with selling out to the very worst quarters of the NeoFascistCon movement, by praising Falwell on national television and speaking at Liberty University’s commencement, in return for his thirty pieces of silver and a little reach-around in the voting booths. How Republican of him. How very Republican.

Of course, Falwell hasn’t changed a bit in six years. Any thinking observer can see that he is still the fun-loving right-wing whacko that he always has been. This is the same guy who sold videotapes on his television show claiming that the Clintons had murdered Vince Foster. He’s blamed the ACLU, gays, abortionists, feminists, liberal judges, and secularists for 9/11. He has claimed that people who aren’t born-again Christians are failures as human beings. He has called for the abolition of public schools, claiming that all schools in the country should be run by Christians. As recently as 1997, he made the incredible assertion that “Grown men should not have sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.”

Huh? McCain is aligning with this guy? Even Falwell says that he doesn’t like what McCain stands for, based on his own statements in an editorial he wrote on his WorldNetDaily (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50190 ) on May 13th.

Yet, McCain goes on national television and refutes his own statements made in 2000, claiming that Falwell is no longer an “agent of intolerance”? Poppycock! Balderdash!

Then, in a move worthy of no less than NeoCon trickmeister and soon-to-be-indicted conspirator Karl Rove, McCain turned loose his pet shark and hatchetman Mark Salter to do a number on Jean Rohe, in a post on Ariana Huffington’s blog. On the one hand, Salter spends a large part of his lengthy post praising McCain and placing him on a pedestal. The rest he spends deriding the New School students in general, and Rohe specifically, referring to them as disrespectful and claiming “that they could learn a thing or two about tolerance and respect from the students of Liberty University”.

Can’t imagine how, since students at Liberty University aren’t taught anything that diverges from Falwell’s own limited world view, and tolerance isn't even in the college catalog there.

Apparently, McCain regards "dissent and disagreement" as a positive quality, at least so long as you are not dissenting or disagreeing WITH HIM!

Finally, Salter closes with an admonition that it is unlikely that Rohe and the New School students “will ever posses (sic) the one small fraction of the character of John McCain.”

Well, if ‘character’ is defined by abandoning your principles when it proves monetarily and politically advantageous; sending hatchetmen to do your own dirty work in print; and aligning yourself with fascisti and NeoCon goose-steppers like the Carlyle Group and Jerry Falwell, I can only hope that Mr. Salter is correct.

I would hate to see a young mind like Jean Rohe’s so hopelessly corrupted by the acquisition of such 'character'.

Until this moment, Senator McCain, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lady further, Senator; you've done enough.

Have you no sense of decency, sir?

At long last, have you left no sense of decency?