RIP McCain. The man was actually a leader instead of the usual cookie cut from one side of the aisle. Thank you McCain for thinking outside the box, your service to this country, for being your own man and a man this country can be proud of. Former Naval aviator and Captain; Vietnam war veteran; and tenacious leader in the Senate, I salute you sir. May you rest in peace.
Bullshit. Dude was a craven political opportunist who got an unjustified reputation as some sort of virtuous political operator because he knew how to ingratiate himself with the idiots in the DC press corps. A politically responsible person who had the best interest of the country at heart would not have been bullied into picking Sarah Palin as his running mate just to avoid a floor fight and a challenge to his nomination at the Republican convention This motherfucker was a bloodthirsty warmonger and a bigot (look up his record on civil rights, opposition to the apartheid government of South Africa etc.). I won't abide this bullshit revisionist history, and I'm not going to give him credit for anything just because he was in a personal dispute with Trump at the time of his death.
I stand corrected my brother. There were a lot of things in his background that I wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing it to light.
It's hard to get the real story on this motherfucker because the media is in full propaganda mode trying to whitewash his political career. There's so much shit on this McCain that I could go on literally all night. I'll just pick the one thing that he's been given credit for recently: saving Obamacare. First off, his vote didn't actually kill the repeal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mccains-vote-obamacare-repeal/ Secondly, he opposed the ACA and any attempt at Medicare expansion for the duration of Obama's presidency. In fact, he ran his entire reelection campaign in 2016, in which he faced a tough primary challenge, on repealing the ACA. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/john-mccain-obamacare-arizona-224622 This dude is a total fraud. He worked actively to deny people healthcare for the entirety of his political career. He only voted against the repeal of the ACA at the last minute after it was clear that it was going to fail to stick it to Trump because of all the shit that Trump talked about him.
I want to see if Trump shows up at his funeral lol. You know it's gotta piss him off that McCain wanted Barack Obama of all people to give a eulogy.
Yet McCain didn't trash Obama and actually told the truth at a campaign rally when that grandma teabagger said he was a Muslim. As most republican politicians go, McCain wasn't as strident or partisan as his party was in general.
Get the fuck outta here with that shit. How the fuck are you going to give him credit for mildly chastising that old woman when she was emboldened to say what she did because of all the dog whistles that Palin was throwing out during her stump speeches? People seem to have forgotten that Palin rallies in '08 were as bad as Trump rallies are now. Yet McCain never publicly rebuked anything that she said or told her to stop. In fact, she continued to attack Obama after the town hall that you're referencing. He benefitted from a racist campaign. That's an incontrovertible fact. He also allowed himself to be bullied into picking her as his running mate because he didn't want to risk losing his nomination in a floor fight at the GOP convention. The "principled hero" took the easy way out and foisted a total incompetent into national politics just to aggrandize himself. McCain is not a fucking hero or a noble statesman. He was garden variety career Washington politician.
I actually knew McCain and worked with him on a committee, I can tell you from "personal" experience that most of what Frederick is saying here is VERY accurate, I was not a fan of his, I respected his service, but beyond that, he was a condescending bastard when it came to matters of "race".
Medhi Hasan gives the most honest assessment of CCain as a politician and a human being that I've seen in the past few days.
It's a symptom of how caustic American politics has become that McCain is hailed in death as some kind of moderate
I give McCain credit for some things such as defending Obama from the racist woman (I do remember when that happened on their POTUS campaign trail), and most recently for his late night arrival to vote down the repeal of the ACA. That said... I won't pretend that McCain is some great person who should be admired by all.
Since Meghan McCain is getting a bunch of undeserved credit for her grandstanding speech at her father's memorial, I figured I'd drop some more receipts. Not only that, the broad was basically staning for Trump and claiming that liberals are worse than MAGAs on The View until the latest barrage of insults directed at her family. #TheResistance is the biggest crock of shit that I've seen in my life. Normalizing all sorts of hideous people, including the likes of George W. Bush, just to oppose to Trump. It's no wonder that the US is in the state that it is. A lot of so-called liberals are just as fucking stupid as MAGAs. In the past 24 hours, I've seen a bunch of black people saying "Bush wasn't so bad" because he slipped candy to Michelle Obama. This motherfucker was the first modern Republican POTUS to openly shun the NAACP and got elected based on the suppression of black votes by his equally incompetent brother in Florida. People have lost their goddamned minds.
Then he voted for the Trump tax cuts, which kneecapped the ACA by repealing in the individual mandate. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/01/sen...e-support-bill-that-would-hurt-obamacare.html This vote also conflicted with his career long position against expanding the national debt. https://www.businessinsider.com/joh...s-tax-bill-cuts-deficit-regular-order-2017-12 Dude was a standard Republican. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Here is the actual exchange: The woman told John she "could not trust Obama..had read he's an Arab" (not American)
...and as I noted earlier in the thread, he never called on Palin to stop the bullshit hate rallies and they continued afterwards in his name. Microcism of the McCain hero worship: giving the dude credit for cynical performative bullshit when he's functionally on the wrong side of the issue.
Those crazy people were just awful. Per the sudden hero worship, l saw an interesting (sarcastic) comment: "Listening to the Senator John McCain eulogies and all I can think is why didn’t Obama, Biden, and everyone else step aside in 2008 and let this incredible man become President?"
heres john mccain's voting record on south africa.... — 1985: Voted To Recommit Anti-Apartheid Act To Foreign Affairs Committee Postponing Sanctions Against South Africa: McCain voted to postpone for one year the imposition of any sanctions against South Africa, permitting the president to waive the sanctions if he determined that the African National Congress had not renounced violence. — 1985: Voted To Allow U.S. Firms Continue Investing In South Africa: McCain voted to let U.S. firms continue investing in South Africa if their units comply with a code of worker rights. — 1985: Voted Against Requiring Immediate Withdrawal Of U.S. Investment From South Africa: McCain voted against imposing a total ban on U.S. exports to South Africa. — 1985: Voted Against Establishing A Commission To Study Apartheid In South Africa And To Recommend Sanctions: McCain voted against establishing a commission to study apartheid in South Africa and to recommend what sanctions the United States should impose on the government. — 1985: Voted Against Imposing Sanctions Against South Africa: McCain voted against imposing sanctions immediately against South Africa. — 1986: Voted Against Considering Imposing Economic Sanctions Against South Africa: McCain voted against providing for House floor consideration of the bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa.
I don't know if McCain's position on SA was racial or economic, but as a rule divesting completely from any country doesn't always generate political change, or help the people on the ground that need those jobs. Apartied didn't end because the rest of the world cut them off economically. It ended because a powerful social justice, civil rights movement overwhelmed the White power structure's status quo. We impose sanctions all the time on bad actors all around the globe and it doesn't really change things except make the people in those countries poorer. One of my biggest problems with McCain was his position on establishing a MLK holiday, in that McCain was against it before he was for it.
