I’ll let Erik Loomis speak for me on McCain.
Wow just wow. Thanks for the reminder that awful people are on both sides of the political spectrum.
I’ve seen some statements that have made me ashamed of some of my fellow folks on the left last night.
It’s not a majority- but there are some fringe voices who are acting very Trump-like, and that has convinced me, given the opportunity, they’d be just as bad. I want to make sure those voices stay fringe.
False equivalents seems to be a necessity of any conversative voter I guess.
I never new he had a divorce, and had multiple affairs.
Can anyone confirm whether that is true?
Yep, true
Well, that’s a shame.
He did go through a lot, and in my mind, he is a hero for surviving what he did, and I thought well of him on a personal level. But adultery is something that really upsets me.
Anyway, regardless of the mans fault, I hope he is rewarded for his service in the after life.
I agree. While he did what politicians are wont to do (lie, cheat, and compromise away their integrity), in the end I think he was a good person with some bad decisions along the way.
I don’t understand how anyone who believes that the modern Republican party is an existential threat to the Republic and an offense to the concepts of liberty and equality – you know, anyone with half a brain – can see McCain for anything other than what he was: part of the machine that brought us Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.
My tears remain firmly unshed.
I think McCain badly wanted to be the man he portrayed himself as — which is not nothing, everyone should aspire to that — but he just didn’t have it in him.
Much is being made of McCain’s rebuttal to the woman who called Obama an Arab, but what seems to be missed in praising that response is this:
- It was McCain himself who first tried to link Obama to ‘terrorist’ Bill Ayers in April of 2008
- It was McCain’s campaign that announced it would begin attacking Obama personally in early October 2008
- It was McCain’s VP pick - his primay surrogate - who launched the attack with the ‘palling around with terrorists’ line on Oct 4 2008
- 10 days after the ‘Arab’ incident, for which McCain gets so much credit, McCain’s campaign launched a robo-call blitz again linking Obama to ‘terrorist’ Bill Ayers
I won’t demonize or lionize people who have passed away, save Hitler-ish exceptions. The former is just being a freaking asshole to those who cared for them, and the latter—thanks to our human foibles—will always entail some sweeping under the rug. However, I will appreciate people for both who they were and who they aspired to be. I believe the vast majority of the time, McCain thought he was doing things for the greater good and that’s commendable in my book, even if the fruits of his labor aren’t to my liking.
I agree with this. I lived in Arizona for a long time and watched McCain’s career in Arizona politics from the beginning. He very much wanted to be the strong independent voice which would represent the best of the state he represented. He succeeded far more often than many.
John McCain was willing to put country before party which is something sorely lacking. Overall, losing him is a loss for the nation. He was the last Republican that I voted for President.
As a conservative, who because of Tea Party followed by Freedom Caucus followed by Trump’s takeover no longer has any political party representing my views… I can assure you that you definitely don’t want the lunatic fringe to take over. :(
McCain was tortured in a prisoner of war camp, and when given the opportunity to take advantage of his family’s position, he refused to be released until the men captured before him were. And as a result of that, he endured even more torture as punishment.
That kind of act transcends partisan political bullshit. It is something that few if any here could possibly do themselves.
Yes, and obviously it speaks well of his character, but it’s not the whole story about him, particularly his political career. I mean, Strom Thurmond was a war hero too.
One problem with McCain IMO is that liberals (at least centrist liberals) wanted to like him so much that they tended to forget he was still a Republican.
People are complex. They are not a monolithic quantity of abstract good.
The guy voluntarily endured torture that permanently crippled him for life, in service to his fellow servicemen. His career is a series of actions which seem to be an attempt to do the right thing for the country.
His beliefs might not be yours, but i believe they were motivated by a fundamental desire to do good for his country.
Sometimes you need to just lay down the cudgel of political partisanship, and honor good things that someone did. Sometimes we need to just step back from the cliff’s edge, and stop being dicks.
My perhaps flawed view:
A bad thing: John McCain, acting on the advice his campaign staff of Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, Nicolle Wallace, John Weaver et al., opened Pandora’s Box, twice, in the fall of 2008. First by putting Palin on the ticket without proper vetting, but second, by listening to FOX news, Roger Ailes, and Rupert Murdoch and introducing race into the campaign – even obliquely – by letting Palin run with her attack dog thing for a month after he stepped in it on the whole “Fundamentals of our economy are strong” thing. Her “Pallin’ around with terrorists” and dark implications and insinuations about Obama and race found great purchase and took off, out from under the campaign strategists.
I don’t think any of those are bad people in that campaign, besides Palin. I don’t think they knew and even remotely grasped what they were about to do. And then they did grasp it, and I think to a person (maybe not Rick Davis, but certainly Schmidt, Weaver, and Wallace to name three, along with Senator McCain and his family) were horrified at the collateral damage that their own actions had caused.
And so you see in those clips that are making their way around the internet today, of McCain late in the 2008 campaign defending Obama’s honor and correcting supporters who call him an “Arab” in an obvious synonym for “terrorist brown person”. It’s the Senator desperately (and one senses, forlornly and with a realization of his own grave error) trying to put that toothpaste back into the tube.
He and his strategists didn’t create the new Republican party. That was Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck 60%, and failed economic policies (which McCain and his staff were certainly part of, so fair to lump them in there) that gave rise to the Tea Party which then morphed into Trumpism. But McCain’s part in creating that wasn’t that big, as I’m probably badly stating, even if some blame can be laid there. But he was the guy who unlocked the cage and released that monster into the world. It’s likely someone else was going to do it, and do it before Trump, even. But McCain was the guy who stirred the tanks, as it were.
But yeah, that’s something that will be part of his complex history as a politician as much as anything else. It should hardly be dismissed; it’s a major part of the shit state of our political rhetoric now. But I think when considering McCain as a whole, it also should only be part (a crucial one) of the story.
… The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the rise of the “Christian Coalition” as a political force. Those events turned the GOP into a white christian identity party. For voters, politics has always been tribal, more about identity than policy. All the more so if your party affiliation is tied to your race and religion. Those are the core of most people’s self-image.
I don’t dispute that the Fox, Rush, etc played a major role. But I think they followed and amplified a trend that was already happening.
Not gonna say FTFY, because I agree with pretty much everything you said. But I think the root causes of today’s GOP go deeper and farther back :)
The MAGA crowd on Twitter is just as bad. They are celebrating his death. I know it’s just Twitter, but my faith in the people of this country continues to drop.
BTW, McCain requested that George W. Bush and Barack Obama deliver eulogies at his funeral, and apparently both will.