Life tragically imitated art today, as actor John Spencer died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was one week shy of his 59th birthday.

Spencer, who appeared on programs including The Patty Duke Show and L.A. Law, most recently portrayed former White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry on The West Wing. Ironically, his character left the top job at the White House on the show because he suffered a heart attack at Camp David.

An actor who emulated humanity, Spencer battled alcohol both on screen and in real life, and brought his struggle to The West Wing with grace and humility. His world-weary presence and wry one-liners made viewers long for an administration headed by the morally centered Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) instead of … well, you know.

Spencer will most definitely be missed by his TV family, where the plot had him running as a candidate for vice president with U.S. Rep. Matthew Santos, D-Texas (fellow L.A. Law alum Jimmy Smits) against veteran California U.S. Sen. Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda). In the most recent episode, McGarry agreed to take on more oversight of the campaign, but refused to fire campaign manager Josh Lyman (Bradly Whitford).

We at Various Things & Stuff will surely miss Spencer.

In politics, every day, every moment, is a new opportunity to start anew, forgetting the past and striding boldly toward a bright future.

And then the damn liberal media, with their notebooks, and videotapes, and archives, come in a ruin the whole damn thing.

Such was the case Thursday, when President George W. Bush sought to jump on the anti-torture train, after having tried intensely for months to derail it. But thanks to the persistence of U.S. Sen. John McCain, and the fact that Bush was clearly in the moral wrong, the president was forced to surrender.

“We’re happy to work with him [McCain] to achieve a common objective, and that is, to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture whether it be at home or abroad,” Bush said, in a story that appeared in today’s Review-Journal.

Of course, there’s bullshit woven through every line of that quote. Let’s debullshitize, shall we?

• Bush isn’t happy to work with McCain at all. In fact, he did everything he could to torpedo McCain’s torture-banning language, from deploying Vice President Dick Cheney to ask for an exception for CIA interrogators to threatening a presidential veto. (Bush has never vetoed a bill in his presidency.)

In fact, Bush only relented when the Senate passed the anti-torture bill 90-9 and the House passed a resolution 30-122. For those keeping score at home, that’s more than enough to override a presidential veto, and thus, Bush was out of options.

• This government does torture, whether it be at hastily abandoned secret prisons (which administration officials refuse to acknowledge or disavow), at Abu Ghraib, or at Guantanamo Bay. We also torture by turning prisoners over to countries that we know will use torture. And, to be particularly sly about parsing the president’s language, private contractors are not exactly “this government,” are they? So if a private contractor tortures, even if he’s paid with government funds, it’s not like the government is torturing somebody, right?

By the way, we’re pretty sure it’s the international convention on torture, not “of torture.” There’s a key difference.

In any case, let’s turn to the only guy with moral sense, no doubt learned as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, when he was tortured, McCain. “We’ve sent a message that the United States is not like the terrorists. We are … a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people, no matter how evil or bad they are,” McCain said. “And I think that this will help us enormously in winning the war for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world.”

If only that were true. The sending a message part, that is. The message we’ve really sent is that the United States elected a president who had to be politically outmaneuvered into supporting a ban on torture, and who is apparently too stupid to understand what Nitzche meant when he said, “when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

Too harsh? Not really: A bill by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would allow interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to detain indefinitely people identified as terrorists from suspects who were “coerced,” which some think might make McCain’s bill worthless.

Wonder how anti-torture President Bush will handle that one?