McCain is a perfect candidate. For the year 2000. It's known to be a pretty widely held opinion.
I remember watching him on C-Span railing against government funding of "clean coal" experiments. This was during his maverick phase, and he was doing a nice job talking to, (but not ultimately convincing), his whacky party to cut this funding because it never had a snowballs chance in hell of actually producing clean burning coal. He used to always bitch about everyone jamming their pet funding projects into other completely unrelated bills and earned the label "maverick" for it.
But coal has gotten worse in the past 8 years, not better. When they were sued in west virginia for violating the clean water act, the then-republican controlled government decided to not fight it. Instead they *changed the law itself* to make it acceptable to dump their waste, including contaminated waste so that mountain top mining operations could continue! Mountain top mining is where they blast and strip the entire top of mountains, remove the coal, then dump the waste down the mountain side, filling in valleys. This was causing water to become contaminated to the point where residents were replacing their home filtration filters once every few days, instead of once every 6 months like normal people. They were getting sick. So they sued based on the clean water act being violated in plain sight. And the dickheads changed the laws, turning back the clock once again, and said FUCK YOU to the dying citizens in support of Big Coal.
McCain's in support of the coal companies again, he wants to drill for oil again, he's all about funding all this backwards bullshit. Gosh what happened? He's against his past self on so many issues, he's anti-straight talk, anti-maverick now. He's fall-in-line McCain now and he's stuck there. It's almost as if his entire party is beholden to some large energy concerns. But that couldn't be. That'd be nuts.
