It's interesting to see how he will be remembered. I'm guessing, he wouldn't be too thrilled about the responses in this thread. One of the odd things about his reputation as a war monger is that he has also been one to oppose Pentagon spending. He lamented spending on the F-22, and we now have an air force that has no new air superiority fighter other than the 140+ F-22s, which can't be in two places at the same time. The F-35 is a great plane, but isn't meant to be a dog fighter.
John McCain Battles Donald Trump With His Dying BreathsSenator Lindsey Graham once described his friend John McCain as someone who would “run across the street to get in a good fight.”
McCain has waged it in public remarks since Trump’s election, including a speech in Philadelphia last October, when he pushed back against the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that was gripping too many Americans and lamented the abdication of America’s moral leadership in the world.
This is where McCain seems to be utterly lost. I think getting rid of Saddam Hussein was just fine, but it would take more troops to hold Iraq than the Bush administration was going to use. Was that moral leadership? Obama ran around lamenting Russia because of Putin's opposition to homosexual propaganda, while Obama promoted the same in the Middle East. In spite of the mainstream media spewing crap tons of propaganda constantly, religious Americans generally still think homosexuality is a sin. Is promoting homosexuality moral leadership? The same can be said of pushing abortion as "women's rights." Is that moral leadership? People like John McCain seem to have a profound disconnect between the morality they grew up with and the stuff they are pushing today. They don't see why people disagree with them.
He wages it in a forthcoming book, “The Restless Wave,” an advance excerpt of which includes his complaint that Trump fails “to distinguish the actions of our government from the crimes of despotic ones” and that he prioritizes “a reality-show facsimile of toughness” over “any of our values.”
The irony here is that under Bush and Obama, our own government played as much of a despotic role. The NSA's spying on Americans, the IRS scandal, the treatment of proponents of honest voting like Catherine Engelbrecht made a complete mockery of the United States on the world stage as they sent the IRS, OSHA, ATF (or whatever they call it now), FBI, etc. to harass her business. Currently, they are investigating Donald Trump's campaign with an independent counsel based upon a phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC and compiled by a "former" MI6 officer. In view of that, Trump has brought North Korea to the negotiating table--part of which involved bolstering military force in the Korean peninsula, and part of which involved imposing tough sanctions on North Korea as well as sanctions on China--an area where many people thought Trump had caved. So Trump has done something that nobody has been able to do for ages, while McCain has signed off on early termination of critical weapons platforms and characterizes Trump has having a "facsimile of toughness." Again, in view of Bush and Obama and their abuses of power, exactly what are our values?
The fight isn’t really between two men. It’s between two takes on what matters most in this messy world. I might as well be blunt: It’s between the high road and the gutter. McCain has always believed, to his core, in sacrifice, honor and allegiance to something larger than oneself. Trump believes in Trump, and whatever wreckage he causes in deference to that god is of no concern.
How is cutting weapons programs, being for pretty much every war, and promoting homosexuality and abortion around the world the "high road." Trump seems to be substantially more effective than his predecessors.
So Kerrey knows that Trump has caused McCain no small measure of anguish, but less because of Trump’s crassness and the daily tragicomedy of his administration — this, too, shall pass — than because of “the impact on democracy.”
What impact on democracy? Like using the FISA courts to spy on an adversarial political campaign? These people not only have no shame, they have no inclination of how utterly wrong they are about so many things.
At a forum in Iowa, Trump mocked McCain’s many years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam — years during which McCain refused offers of release because he didn’t want to be a tool of North Vietnamese propaganda — by saying: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
McCain characterized everyone who supported Trump as "whacko birds." Trump, true to form, struck back--especially at a grossly inflated military performance.
McCain has his share, including the occasional rashness reflected in his selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate in 2008. Did she help pave the way for Trump? What a cruel irony if so.
Sarah Palin was well-known for fighting corruption in Alaska politics. She wasn't trashed, because she was stupid. She was trashed, because she was a threat to the establishment, which is corruption writ large. It's also why these people cannot talk about "values" and be taken seriously anymore. They are the only ones who don't seem to get it.
During the last weeks of Trump’s presidential campaign, he branded Hillary Clinton a criminal and encouraged supporters to chant, “Lock her up.”
Hillary Clinton is a criminal and she should be locked up. Again, it's a case where the establishment imprisons a navy kid for a selfie on a submarine, but allows a Secretary of State to set up an insecure email server that contains plenty of classified information--a fact she denies, but the FBI who decided not to prosecute her confirms. She also destroyed 30k emails, many of which weren't personal and contained classified information while it was under congressional subpoena. If a navy kid goes to jail for this, surely Hillary Clinton should too. Yet, once again, the establishment seems to have no clue that they are the last people who see themselves as moral actors.
McCain never badmouthed Palin, despite ample reason.
What reason? They lampooned her position on Russia, and they have now come to her side on Russia only to go much further and suggest that Trump is a Russian puppet and we should impeach him for it. Again, does the establishment have no collective memory?
Trump demands instant gratification. McCain served for four years in the House before his three decades in the Senate, during which he worked his way up to his cherished post as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He tried — and failed — to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 before succeeding eight years later.
Okay. So let's compare McCain to Obama. Obama served two years in the United States Senate where he accomplished nothing. Obama also served in the Illinois legislature where his vote of "present" rather than yea or nea was his lasting contribution. What this comment shows is that McCain was a failure. Trump succeeded at winning the nation's highest political office with no prior political experience--that's incredible. Characterizing it as impatience is bewildering.
“There is a scarcity of humility in politics these days,” McCain writes. I wonder if he has anyone particular in mind. No, that’s a lie: All of us know precisely which someone he has in mind, the same person in his thoughts when, in Munich in February 2017, he expressed alarm about an “increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race,” about “the hardening resentment we see toward immigrants” and about “the growing inability—and even unwillingness—to separate truth from lies.”
And McCain had no such words when he was beat by a man who suggested that he could halt the rise of the sea as though he were Moses. Homosexuality, abortion and radical egalitarianism are not universal values.
“I don’t remember another time in my life when so many Americans considered someone’s partisan affiliation a test of whether that person was entitled to their respect,” he writes, ruefully, adding that while Biden, Ted Kennedy and other Democratic friends of his never voted for the same candidate for president as he did, his friendships with them “made my life richer, and made me a better senator and a better person.”
Such grace is unimaginable from Trump.
Again, from an establishment that is trying to undermine political support for Donald Trump with Stormy Daniels, but continues to put Ted Kennedy up as "the lion of the senate" when he killed a woman. The establishment is utterly without any sense of introspection, reflection or humility. They wonder why the country has turned against them and the only thing they won't do to understand that political trend is take a look in the mirror and examine their own track record.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden