Thought I'd get in my first round of solidified thoughts before the inevitable last-days-and-then-aftermath tsunami of takes, most of which will be replete with mind-numbing "great American" platitudes, gets going.
He was from a Navy family of considerable distinction, and he acquiesced to the pressure to be part of that lineage. I do, as someone with a lifelong rock & roll rebel attitude, admire the fact that he went into it with a notable degree of cockiness. Smashed up some planes during pilot training. The business about visiting strip clubs? I'm a little less inclined to pump my fist about that, for reasons that recent posts here touching on human sexuality should make clear. For one thing, that wasn't the end of it; his marital track record is really no more admirable than that of the Very Stable Genius or Billy Jeff the Zipper.
But it served him well during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton. A fellow prisoner recalls that he'd hear McCain's screams and wails during his daily torture sessions, but that, on McCain's walk back down the hall to his cell, he'd make eye contact with the other guy through a thin crack in the other guy's cell doorway that they'd both discovered, and give him a smile and a thumbs-up.
I love that.
I love that.
And he did indeed show a great deal of promise as a consistently principled Reaganite once elected to the Senate. But that dissipated quickly. He voted against tax cuts. He voted against "A"CA repeal. You don't do that if you're a conservative.
The behavior, though, that I'm going to have to deal with, in terms of the fact that it embitters me, is the way he conducted himself during his 2008 run for president. When the lady in the audience at a campaign event asked him about Obama being a Muslim and Arab - a wacky, boneheaded statement that lamentably distracted from what should have been the main point - that Obama was a hard-core, America-hating socialist - he accommodated the distraction by responding with some crud about Obama being a good, nice family man, which had nothing to do with the subject at hand. The main thing that rubbed me raw, though, was the statement to the effect that "while we sharply disagree with our friends across the aisle about how to achieve various goals, let us remember that they are not our enemies."
Wrong, Senator. They are our enemies. Like Iran and North Korea, they have said so in no uncertain terms. Democrats hate human freedom, Western civilization and God.
So, may God have mercy on his soul.
And, to reiterate, there are good reasons to call him an American hero.
But in overall political and historical terms, he did significant harm to America.
You know, this post - especially the last half or so - is exactly the sort of godawful rambling nonsense that they always look for when trying to see if there were any signs that could have warned us all before the poor wretch went off his rocker. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course you're going to view it that way. You're a Democrat. Any other reaction would be surprising.
ReplyDeleteWell, then, allow me to respond with an equal amount of intellectual heft:
DeleteSo's your old man!
Dirty laundry always makes me cry. The only good reasonable gentleman is a dead one, huh.
ReplyDeleteYour comments, Dings, have become so clever that a simpleton like myself can no longer discern your points.
DeleteRS, I'm from the opposite end of the spectrum from you, and I often find his comments impenetrably esoteric.
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ReplyDeleteWell, what I had in mind was combining words and sentiments from the songs Sad Movies and Dirty Laundry. The sentence following that should be self-explanatory. Wasn't it ironic? I'll try to be more mindful of the intellectual heft here moving forward.
ReplyDeleteI googled McCain damaged America but all I could come up with was damage done to the USS John McCain. And plenty of Trump damaged America, so I decided to google Reagan damaged America, and page after page after page of links. Does the bloggie have some erudite links he can point me to to elaborate on the Mackie and the damage done (sung to the tune of the Neil Young song)?
ReplyDeleteNope. No links. Just this post. And this excerpt from John F diLeo's FB post about it:
ReplyDeleteWhen he entered politics, he appeared to side with the right, and he carefully managed to ensure that his voting record always looked conservative. McCain died with a lifetime ACU rating of 81%, which isn't bad... but it's deceptive. He always made sure to vote right on most unimportant bills to keep his voting record conservative, but then he would pick just one or two huge issues - massive issues - and take a very public position in opposition to the right position, This enabled him to do two things that he truly loved doing: to call himself a "maverick" for bucking his party on an important issue so he could get liberal media acclaim, and to truly stab in the back the people on the right side. He only did this on the biggest, most important issues. Federal judges... campaign finance regulations... immigration policy... obamacare... he didn't oppose the conservative agenda very often - only when he could personally really do massive damage to it.
And when you talk about missed opportunities, will there ever be a better example than his ghastly 2008 campaign for the White House? The man actually said, while running for president, that he didn't really understand economics at all. Yes, out loud. Of course he lost. He didn't try. He practically threw the race (some actually believe he intentionally did throw the race, though I doubt that)... Obama didn't understand economics better than McCain did, but Obama was at least bright enough not to tell the electorate that.
John McCain was an almost thoroughly destructive force in the Republican party for at least the past 20 years. Many would argue he was destructive all the way back to his early races.
I have never been a fan of legally mandated term limits, but John McCain is truly the poster child for them. If he had retired 20 years ago, his memory would have at least been a generally positive one. But today, after these past 20 years of shenanigans, his memory is almost entirely negative. He was so bold, so loud, so omnipresent thanks to his pals in the media, that whenever he did one of his big liberal gestures, we all saw it. We couldn't miss it.
Bibi's hailing him as a great friend to Israel but perhaps he's merely avoiding disparaging the dead.
ReplyDeleteHis support for Israel was one for the good side of the ledger.
ReplyDeleteMy condolences to you, DiLeo, Trump and your ilk who must endure so many international accolades for the man as you know the sad truth about his wretched soul at least you pray for mercy for. Ahh, but ain't that post-America on this wretched doomed planet.
ReplyDeleteDonnie pulled the flag back up to full staff, breaking with tradition, before the internment. Nice gesture that Congress did not copy.
ReplyDeleteGov. Holcomb has ordered flags in Hoosierland to fly at half staff until sundown Sunday. How could he do that with all the damage McCain did to America? Would you lower your flag for even a day?
ReplyDeleteLet's keep this at the level of grown-up discourse, shall we? There's enough juvenile tribalistic jabbing going on on social media.
ReplyDeleteTo reiterate the main points of this post:
1.) McCain was undeniably a hero for his time as a POW. History will rightly confirm that.
2.) As a young man, he behaved like a rogue, and later in life, while he seems to have settled into a good marriage with Cindy, he continued to prove himself irascible and petty, playing political "gotcha" over very important issues that would affect the course of the nation's life long-term (such as being the vote that prevented skinny repeal of the "A"CA).
3.) The reason his 2008 presidential campaign went so abysmally was that he never let the voting public know just what the hell he stood for, and that's because he didn't stand for anything beyond some kind of broadly defined love of country. Refusing to acknowledge the all-out war the Left (politically in the form of the Democrats) was waging on America was the main form this took.
4.) The main problem with treading ever so carefully re: McCain - the whole "don't-speak-ill-of-the-recently-departed" thing - is that it leaves out an aspect of who he was that affected the course of the nation's life as much as his laudable military service.
5.) He made much more consistent sense on foreign policy than he did on domestic issues. (He readily admitted he didn't know much about economics.)
6.) The fact that it's hard leftists who today are in why-can't-republicans-be-like-McCain-anymore mode confirms what I say in point number 3. Hard leftists like their Republicans to be of the let's-remember-the-folks-across-the-aisle-are-not-our-enemies variety. You know the ones who are cool with gracefully losing.
You see, there's this thing called nuance that comes into play when assessing public and historical figures.
ReplyDeleteDonnie ran the flag back up his pole and even expanded on his statement following McCain's death, after his wife went before the press to praise McCain. I think it's been observed here before that for a man who doesn't drink, Trump is certainly foolishly frivolous. But we knew that.
ReplyDeleteYup. Daren Jonescu thinks so , too, per the post above.
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