John McCain was a dirtbag. A war monger. A coward who only verbally
scolded Trump while signing off on nearly all of his policies (cough,
tax scam bill, cough) and appointees. He is the guy who started the
whole "troll candidacy" business when he had that awful prick Sarah
palin be his running mate. He has spend his entire life hurting people
and helping get millions killed. To see him whitewashed like that and
hailed a hero, even and especially by Liberals, is appalling but also
disconcerting. It’s “nice” (on the surface that is) Republicans like
McCain who provide cover for evil swine like Mitch McConnell, allowing
them to gut the American security net and fuck over anyone who doesn’t
live behind an iron gate. McCain’s illness and death shouldn'’t act as
some magical shield that absolve him from abetting—no wait, LEADING—a
GOP whose appetite for brazen monstrousness grows by the day. And yet,
there were Senate Democrats giving our man a standing O right after he
gleefully fucked their constituents, because Democrats would happily set
aside differences with Godzilla for the sake of civility.
Hold the Plaudits, John McCain’s 2008 Campaign Paved the Way for Donald Trump
Mehdi Hasan
The Intercept, August 28 2018
Donald Trump might not be sitting in the White House today.
At first glance, that might sound odd. The six-term Republican senator, who passed away Saturday, has been hailed as an outspoken opponent of the president, while Trump himself despised McCain and famously claimed the former prisoner of the Vietcong was “not a war hero.”
McCain has also been held up, by both right and left alike, as an exemplar of political civility, integrity, and decency; a nonracist Republican; the anti-Trump. Bernie Sanders called him “a man of decency and honor;” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised him as an “unparalleled example of human decency.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if you discount the fact that McCain once publicly dismissed his wife as a “cunt.” Or that he referred to two of his fellow Republican senators as a “fucking jerk” and an “asshole.” Or that he mocked Chelsea Clinton, then a teenager, as “ugly.” Or that he refused to apologize for calling his Vietnamese captors “gooks.” Or that he slammed anti-war protesters as “low-life scum.”
Ignore all of that and you’re still left with his hate-mongering, race-baiting, Trump-precursing 2008 presidential campaign — against the first black Democratic nominee for the White House. How have the vitriol and smears of a decade ago been so easily forgotten by his eulogizers? So casually consigned to the media memory hole?
As even Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host and former adviser to McCain, conceded during the 2016 campaign: “Mr. Trump is riding the wave of anxiety that Ms. Palin first gave voice to as Senator John McCain’s running mate. Mr. Trump has now usurped and vastly expanded upon Ms. Palin’s constituency, but the connection between the two movements is undeniable.”
Is it any wonder then that the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin, in an otherwise fawning piece on the late Arizona senator in May, observed how “many in Mr. McCain’s own party believe that, by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, he bears at least a small measure of blame for unleashing the forces of grievance politics and nativism within the Republican Party”?
Remember also: McCain has never apologized for picking Palin. As Martin reported in his piece, McCain did express regret that he hadn’t selected his friend and fellow Sen. Joe Lieberman as his 2008 running mate, but “he continues to defend Ms. Palin’s performance.” Yes, her racist and conspiratorial performance. That performance.
You think shouting “lock her up” and “CNN sucks” at Trump rallies is bad? McCain-Palin rallies in 2008 featured Republican supporters in the audience shouting “Traitor!”, “Terrorist!”, “Off with his head!”, and “Kill him!” at the mere mention of Obama’s name. “Watch the tape of the guy screaming, ‘He’s a terrorist!’ McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes … and I thought for a moment he’d admonish the man. But he didn’t,” wrote Joe Klein in Time magazine on October 9, 2008. “True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn’t done the right thing all year.”
On October 11, 2008, Democratic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis lambasted both McCain and Palin for “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” and even compared their dangerous campaign rhetoric to that of arch-segregationist George Wallace.
Some conservatives expressed outrage with McCain, too. David Frum accused him of “whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November.” Andrew Sullivan urged the Arizona senator to desist from dangerous and inflammatory attacks on a young, black Democrat: “For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.” Republican activist and former McCain ally Frank Schaeffer denounced the GOP presidential candidate for “playing with fire,” unleashing a “monster of American hate and prejudice,” and holding rallies that “are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.”
Yet, astonishingly, all of this has been whitewashed from McCain’s political record. None of it makes an appearance in the raft of unctuous obituaries that have been published since Saturday. Instead, a single moment from that campaign — in which a woman at a town hall accused Obama of being “an Arab” and McCain replied by saying, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man” — has become the only thing anyone seems to remember from it. Over the past couple of days, the clip of that exchange has gone viral on Twitter, with everyone from former Bush administration official Fran Townsend to liberal author Stephen King, citing it as proof of the late senator’s “character and integrity” and his “finest moment.”
Sorry, what? I have never understood how this was a badge of honor for McCain — nor do many Arab-Americans, for that matter. Actor Ben Affleck summed up the problem on “Real Time with Bill Maher” a few days after the incident. “What if someone said, ‘I heard he’s a Jew.’ ‘No, no, he’s not a Jew, he’s alright … he’s a decent guy’?” Affleck asked the audience. “‘Arab’ and ‘good person’ are not antithetical to one another. … We’ve allowed this idea where denying … that Obama is not an Arab, nor is he a Muslim, we’ve allowed that denial to turn into the acceptance of both of those things as a legitimate slur.”
In 2008, McCain could have pushed back against this idea, expressed by the increasingly Trumpish GOP rank and file, that there was something wrong with being Arab or Muslim; after all, his fellow Republican and Vietnam veteran Colin Powell did so rather eloquently on television around the same time. But, no, McCain, whether wittingly or unwittingly, allowed a distinction to be drawn between being an Arab and being a decent family man. Some suggest he should be given the benefit of the doubt on that remark because it was a spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff response to a rambling and racist questioner; his intent, they say, was noble.
Maybe. But context matters. How do you explain the rest of his shoddy election campaign? Shamefully, he ran for president while repeatedly claiming his black opponent was a friend of terrorists. Embarrassingly, he chose to give the nativist Palin a national platform she didn’t deserve. Disgracefully, he stayed silent as his own supporters called for the killing and beheading of Obama.
So the reality is this: if you were drawing up a list of Americans who share blame for the rise of Donald Trump, John McCain’s name would have to be somewhere near the top of it. With the noxious Palin at his side, the Arizona senator ran a nasty, bigoted, and desperate presidential campaign in 2008 that paved the way for Trump and Trumpism in 2016.
And you don’t have to take my word for it. It’s been reported that McCain requested for Obama to speak at his funeral. Perhaps the former president can start his eulogy by repeating aloud what he told New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait in October 2016: “I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump … and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party.”
Thanks, John McCain. Thanks a lot.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/27/hold-the-plaudits-john-mccains-2008-campaign-paved-the-way-for-donald-trump/
Selected Comments:
McCain is celebrated in international media as "hero" "war hero" and "maverick", who was "anti-Trump. Many news outlets worldwide just copied the press release of international News agencies.
Whoever put it there - and I know, who it was - has a lot of power. Yes, it was the deep state. And they made a mistake here.
So if you are smart, you watch who prints the Propaganda for McCain. These are media outlets, who will print the next lies for the next US war. In Germany and France for example even little regional news papers will print the lies and not write, what a terrible monster he was. As I said, the deep state MIC has power over the media in many countries and languages.
Swiss outlets all chanted the song of the glorious war hero that wasn't respected by Trump - unisono! Disgraceful, when you remember that McCain advocated for half a dozen wars around the globe, wanted to bomb Iran, North Korea, etc.
2018 = 1968 all over again, a fascist raciest police state. Trump = Nixon. In November the choice will be yours again Freedom or Fascism!
Or more accurately, Trump or the forces that produced Trump. Hillary is why we have Trump.......Nothing more. The DNC rigging their primary gave us Trump, place the blame where it belongs.
McCain was pretty much the nastiest human being in any room at any given moment. Which means, of course, he was an American hero.
Like "paving the way for Donald Trump" was the worst thing about McCain. Give me a break, that is the least of many sins he could be accused of. That clown was a genuine bona fide evil-doer in his own right, a war criminal with blood of thousands on his hands.
They already know this and they know all about his insane blood lust. But the effusive eulogies came regardless, from every quarter, and they will keep on coming. That is the moral clarity of "the world's last best hope," c. 2018
Truths that can'’t be spoken in American corporate media:
McCain never saw the prospect of a war anywhere in the world he did not instantly support - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. He advocated for prolonged wars. He died not seeing his wish to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" fulfilled. But his legacy is alive and well in Trump's military logic of US domination around the globe.
McCain staunchly supported Israel, could not care less for the fate of Palestinians, and for a while even considered the arch-Zionist Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2008. But with his hardline support for sending arms to Syria, he played a key role in aggressively militarising the peaceful resistance to Assad regime.
John McCain’s domestic political rhetoric is not nearly as bad as his bloodthirsty war-crazed contribution to US foreign policy in the 21st century. He was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and wanted a permanent neocolonial occupation: Cutting off a questioner who talked about the Bush administration's willingness to keep troops in Iraq for 50 years, McCain said "Make it a hundred." He then mentioned that U.S. troops had been in Germany for 60 years and in Korea for 50 years, and added, "That's fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/mccains_100year_war.html He amplified and supported all the lies about WMDs in Iraq that the war criminals GW Bush and Dick Cheney put out there (as did his pal, Hillary Clinton). This history has also been rewritten but here is McCain in 2003 spewing the same BS: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OuAd0YjIfOY A decade later, he was pushing for the arming and financing of ISIS in Syria, again in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the Saudis and Lindsey Graham: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-saudi-arabia-iraq-syria-bandar/373181/
That’s just the short list of this bloodthirsty lunatic’s crimes - it’s ludicrous that he’s been portrayed as some kind of saintly patriotic American hero, when he has as much blood on his hands as Osama bin Laden does.
And if they were "injured, harmed, or killed" he sure wasn't gonna do a thing about it.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/brandon-friedman/mccains-non-support-for-t_b_131046.html
I mean cannon fodder is cannon fodder, except when daddy's an admiral and pins medals all over it:
"McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes. For these brief excursions the admiral’s son was awarded two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned a medal an hour, which is pretty good going."
from: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/27/the-horrors-of-john-mccain-war-hero-or-war-criminal-2/
John McCain didn't do for veterans, the ones that survived the wars he continuously sent them to fight and die in.
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/28-votes-mccain-s-record-against-veterans/
Turn off tv. Remember that politicians are scoundrels, and narcissists, all.
The lot of them certainly want us to speak kindly of their time in office. NONE deserve anything like the media parade that McCain is getting. These money whores need to take heed. American's can still get the truth, and it ain't pretty.
The people most responsible for Trump's election are the Clintons.
https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/
And Obama was, quite frankly, very much to blame for Hillary Clinton. The primary season in advance of the 2016 election should have been wide open on the Democratic side, not sewn up by the Clinton neoliberal machine.
I believe that Obama's tenure and his sitting by while income inequality went sky high during his presidency. The middle and lower classes got poorer while the elites got much richer. Hillary never addressed this, but Trump did. If Obama had kept even half of his campaign promises I'm thinking that Hillary would have had a better chance of being president. Add in the democrats letting republicans roll all over them when they were the minority party and should have been buried after Bush's presidency. The lost 900 seats at the federal and state levels during Obama's 8 years and they did nothing to stop it. Let's face it. Both parties are just as corrupt as the other. This goes for which party's candidate becomes president.
McCain "normalized" overt racism long before Palin. He was openly using racist slurs during interviews with reporters as early as 1999 and continued to do so throughout his presidential campaign and refused to apologize. Of course those slurs were against Asians so the liberals in the media don't care at all.
Ironic that mccain has been praised for being against torture but supports the wars that lead to it.
Ron Paul's take on McCain. . . he epitomizes the neoconservative foreign policy, which we consider a total disaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyR2ty8efDw
Palin was/is certainly a “know-nothing demagogue and conspiracy theorist,” but let’s remember how Reagan got his start. He was pimping the notion that Medicare was a secret communist plot, while arguing that anti-war protestors should be tried as traitors. This got him elected governor, and the rest is history.
The Republican Party has a long tradition of “sensible” types like McCain (or William Buckley) tolerating their party’s wingnut side if it meant furthering their goal of dismantling the New Deal. Which they have largely succeeded in doing. And by doing so, made lives worse for Americans, some of whom then in return embraced even further wingnuttery.
By all means criticize McCain for this, but do remember he was hardly the first.
He was a vicious, sociopathic, murderous criminal and war-monger, in no way deserving of respect, dead or alive.
John McCain was a war- and human rights criminal for what he did in Vietnam. And he not only never apologized for dropping bombs on people in another country that never attacked the U.S., but instead said that this evil war was right. End of story, nothing else needed here.
Voters became disillusioned with the political choices they were offered and began voting for the least qualified candidate on the ballot as a form of protest. Mr. McCain doesn't deserve particular blame (or credit depending on your point of view) for this development.
I think you're overstating the case, Mehdi. Sure, there were ugly aspects to John McCain's 2008 campaign, but the line from there to Trump is not so straightforward. I think you're using hindsight to try to find any and all the historical threads which may have lead to Trump's election in 2016, however thin they may be.
The most important factor in Trump's 2016 election the fact that the American people had become tired of the corrupt establishment of both parties.
In 2016, just like in 2008, Americans wanted a "change" candidate. They wanted an outsider. In 2008, the outsider was Obama. In 2016, the outsiders were Bernie Sanders and Trump.
Once the corrupt DNC killed Bernie Sanders' chances at the presidency by rigging their primary and crowning Hillary Clinton as their nominee (just like she paid them to do), Trump was the only outsider left.
Trump, the outsider, won an election against a corrupt insider in a year when outsiders had a natural advantage. It's quite simple, really. Everyone should have seen it coming a mile away. In fact, some people did:
"And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad.
...
Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? ... voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump."
---Michael Moore's prediction from August 3, 2016
https://web.archive.org/web/20160803195706/https://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/
Another example of the utter depravity of McCain is his performance at a hearing on the suit brought by Elouise Cobell for the recovery of the billions stolen by Energy and Mining corporations for over 100 years from Native lands. He interrupted Cobells' testimony by shouting, "That's a Lie" multiple times even though everyone knew her testimony was the truth. His florid face and bullying tone reflected his disdain for any woman of non-white color who had the audacity to confront the White Supremacist power of the United States government. Elouise sat and took it without a word as she had been confronting these White bullies her whole life. The event can be seen in the documentary of her fight: 100 years, One Woman's Fight for Justice. The final result of the suit was a pittance awarded to the thousands of Native families whose wealth had been stolen. All delayed and orchestrated by the Clinton administration mainly the Secretary of the Interior from Arizona who destroyed records and fought the suit in every way. Had the judge who ruled against them removed. Moved the suit to the Washington, D.C. appeals Court favorable to all Corporate Oligarchy occupants, and finally the Supreme Court where the traitorous Scalia Court finished wiping the slate clean of all of the felonious thievery of the Corporate Oligarchy. Cobell died before she even got 1 cent. Her bravery and death should have received the accolades for this traitor now pouring out of the mealy mouths of the current living politicians of both parties continuing the White Supremacy inherent to the United States every since its conquest and creation. TIME FOR A SECULAR REVOLUTION!
---
Why the US ruling class mourns John McCain
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/27/pers-a27.html
The only reason why MSM is so pro -McCain is because he was anti-Trump.
When a leading arms manufacturer sends a heartbreaking eulogy on social media for McCain , you know what kind of hero he really was.
Not one word from the corporate media that I could see or hear said anything "negative'...or gave the whole true picture of what he was really about. We felt surrounded,outgunned, shocked and defeated by God, like the USA is painfully stupid...that his atrocities are completely acceptable. It is shameful.
Good one from Democracy Now:
Obit Omit: What the Media Leaves Out of John McCain’s Record of Militarism and Misogyny
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/27/obit_omit_what_the_media_leaves
- - -
must-read takedown of the fauxcialists Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez:
Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders praise McCain: An object lesson in the politics of the pseudo-left
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/28/pers-a28.html
excerpt:
"Amidst the outpouring of praise from all sections of the political establishment for Republican Senator John McCain, who died on Saturday, two statements stand out.
The first was from Vermont senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who tweeted: “John McCain was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine. He will be missed not just in the US Senate but by all Americans who respect integrity and independence.”
The second was from Democratic Socialists of America member and New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted: “John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service. As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy. He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.”
Ocasio-Cortez posted with her tweet the editorial from the Washington Post on McCain’s death, “John McCain, the irreplaceable American,” which praised McCain for his work on “national defense and deterrence of foreign aggression” and for “[rising] above party politics to pursue what he honestly saw as the national interest.”
What, one is compelled to ask, are these two individuals, who present themselves as figures of the left and even socialists, talking about? What is McCain’s legacy of “human decency and American service?” What made him an “American hero?”"
If you'’re some Pollyanna offering your support to John McCain after he helped hollow out Medicaid, you’re a naïve dupe. The twin illusions of bipartisanship and decorum have always provided handy cover for anyone looking to willfully ignore the fiendish inequalities of the American political infrastructure and the GOP’s rapturous thirst for cruelty; a thirst that has only recently emerged in the foreground thanks to the existence of Trump for whom McCain paved the way.
McCain is no hero.
He died leaving behind a country HE helped turn into shambles; a fascist craphole. He wont have to live with what he did, we do. Him having died at the ripe old age of 82 doesnt change what he did or make him a hero or honorable man deserving of our praise and respect.
McCain and the Clintons were both responsible -- as was Obama for elevating Hillary after her unspeakably dirty campaign against him for the 2008 nomination. Besides, there is not much difference between McCain and the Clintons apart from party label.
Here is a 1999 piece about a psychiatric evaluation McCain underwent while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The psychological portrait drawn by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral is that of a deeply narcissistic personality, cold, hardened and largely devoid of human empathy, a man who seemed to view the bombing of civilian populations as a kind of sport. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/27/the-horrors-of-john-mccain-war-hero-or-war-criminal-2/
More on McCain:
A Little-Known Story About John McCain and His Fantasies of Benevolent U.S. Foreign Policy
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/27/a-little-known-story-about-john-mccain-and-his-fantasies-of-benevolent-u-s-foreign-policy/
Despite What the Press Says, “Maverick” McCain Has a Long and Distinguished Record of Horribleness
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/john-mccain-fake-maverick-horrible-record/
John McCain Claimed He Cares About “Honor” in the Senate. His Tax Vote Shows He Lied.
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/02/john-mccain-claimed-he-cares-about-honor-in-the-senate-his-tax-vote-shows-he-lied/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
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