Dudes, waterboarding fever: catch it. Former POW and current GOP frontrunner John McCain certainly has. The senator, who once rather poetically referred to the technique as "very exquisite torture," voted Wednesday to authorize waterboarding as a means of collecting information from terror suspects. A bill was passed on to the president despite McCain's virtuouso D.C. pirouette, with 51 non-like-minded senators voting to ban the practice. But! McCain will get another chance after George Bush dismisses the bill with a condescending pat on the ass and tosses it back in the senate hogpit.

Seems the Army Field Manual, that occasional military bible, is a bit harder to read than first imagined. Of the 19, oh, let's call 'em torture techniques, permitted by the Manual, waterboarding is not included. So says Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Yeah, that's the same Bradbury who, in 2005, under cover of night, signed the documents that legalized the practice in the first place. Now: "The set of interrogation methods authorized for current use is narrower than before, and it does not today include waterboarding." Handy! For someone looking to be confirmed at his current post, anyway.

But Back to McCain, who in October 2007 said that waterboarding "is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." Is it more complicated now, or is he still reeling from being carpetbombed at CPAC by the very factions he needs to win over to pull out a victory? Or has the torture that is the campaign trail put these things in perspective for him? We'll give him the former, but are not entirely ruling out the latter.