McCain cracks waterboading joke after slamming Giuliani for same Michael Roston

Published: Monday January 28, 2008



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Print This Email This Senator John McCain's campaign for president in Florida received a major lift after earning the endorsement of Governor Charlie Crist. How did McCain get Crist, who disagrees with the senator on government-backed catastrophe insurance, to support his campaign? Simple: He tortured him, according to the Palm Beach Post's campaign blog: Crist was asked if McCain used that tenacious, unyielding persistence in seeking the guvs endorsement.



Well, not that much, Crist began answering.



It was just waterboarding, McCain interjected. The remark appeared in conflict with McCain's Nov. 2007 broadside against Rudy Giuliani for a joke he made about torture. The former mayor of New York City joked on the campaign trail that if sleep deprivation was a form of torture, so was running for president. McCain's surrogates laid into Giuliani, accusing him of insulting, "all American soldiers who have had to endure real torture and mistreatment while in enemy hands," according to a story in the New York Sun. Giuliani's campaign responded at the time that McCain's own humorous remarks on the campaign trail showed that he should be able to take a joke. McCain is no stranger to humor-related controversies in the presidential race. In April of last year, McCain sang "Bomb Iran," to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" at a South Carolina campaign stop. And later in the month, McCain joked with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's The Daily Show that he had placed an improvised explosive device on his desk. When fellow Vietnam Veteran Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) reacted angrily to the remark, McCain told him and other critics to "lighten up and get a life."



