John McCain has died.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
47 Comments
Well, what are the odds in Vegas that the shithead at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will respond like an actual human being?
If anything even halfway decent comes out of the White House it will be written by someone other than him.
He apparently reacted with “thoughts and prayers” for McCain’s family.
Hope he goes nowhere near the funeral/life celebration.
. . . was a McCain demand, dying wish. Can’t vouch for how authoritative that is. But if true, I bless him for it.
It’s already out there that McCain wants Obama and C- Augustus to eulogize him. Yeah, the same C- Augustus who smeared him in South Carolina back in 2000 during the GOP presidential primary.
I know this thread is over, but the flag over the White House flew at half staff only half a day and is back at full staff now. Trump’s usual cut-and-paste tweet with thoughts and prayers showed his childish level of disrespect as well.
What’s sadder still is that we knew he would be an asshole with McCain’s passing. In that respect, Trump never fails.
What odds some staffer did the automatic right thing about lowering the flag, without Himself ordering it, and that as soon as Himself got back from golfing he saw it and ordered it right back up again?
Somehow, Trump will make this about himself. Just as he did with Aretha Franklin.
I wonder if he will cite McCain’s military service (which Trump has mocked in the past). I’m guessing not.
He blew up McConnell’s grand scheme to kill the ACA.
He also chose Palin as a running mate when he was already rather old, and in imperfect health.
Tried to do something in the teeth of his party and the courts to deal with campaign finance.
Never met a war he didn’t like.
Something of a mixed bag.
He was also pretty consistently against torture. That matters, because torture is disturbingly popular among lots of political stripes, and it takes leadership to keep the lid on it.
Keating 5.
Opposition to torture.
He didn’t caucus with the Dems to save our Republic when it would have cost him literally nothing to have done so. “fell in love with my country” my ass. If he did, she obviously aged, and became a “trollop who plastered on the makeup”.
He also didn’t resign when doing so would have led to a special election. Now Arizona’s Trump-ian Governor gets to appoint someone for the next two years. Meaning all the more likely Kavanaugh will get seated. BTW, McCain voted for all those judges who shit on McCain-Feingold. Was the ACA vote the only one of significance where he voted against Trump? I think so considering he voted for the tax cuts.
After I posted my comment, realized I forget to include his failure to resign. And, yes, he voted Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch. Supported McConnell in denying Garland a vote.
He talked a good game about returning to regular order but other than the ACA vote didn’t lift a finger to make it happen.
Yeah well, I doubt they were ever going to stop Kavanaugh anyway. The republicans have their own special way. Even Susan is going to vote for him. Maybe someday the democrats will figure out how to win an election, short of a damn crisis.
Except you need 51 for a quorum. So if the Democrats stayed away, that means every Republican would have to show up. It would make it harder on the GOP at least. And make sure Jones and Manchin don’t vote for the jackass.
Ridiculous as usual, Phil:
Murc’s Law, Brett Kavanaugh Edition
I don’t think that contradicts my point as so much says that Yertle the Turtle will change the rules if necessary to get Kavanaugh seated. Which I agree he will. The more Senatorial “norms” Yertle the Turtle trashes the better. I think you know why.
Definitely a mixed bag.
I liked him during his Straight Talk Express days; partly, though not entirely, on account of David Foster Wallace’s glowing reports in Rolling Stone. I don’t remember why he lost the nomination to Dubya, but it was a disastrous call. The world be better off if he’d won that nomination, regardless who won the general election. (No Iraq invasion, fewer refugees, no ISIS, $6 trillion less wasted dough. Plus, the 2008 banking meltdown might have been avoided.)
I didn’t like him when he ran against Obama. He’d become crankier and more desperate to toe the party line. But I remember a golden moment (despite his detestable unleashing of Palin upon the world). Late in the campaign, when he was losing and the Repubs were getting really ugly, he responded to a hysterical audience member with the following reassurance: “I have to tell you. Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.”
May seem trivial, but it was decency’s last stand. He chose truth over fear-mongering at his own expense. How many on Capitol Hill would do that today?
Tragic portrait of his marriage in “Game Change.” Seems to have been a open marriage, which is fine if that’s what people want, but the fighting… yowser.
Long, strange trip; far from perfect. But I’ll miss him and I wish there were more like him.
Those words and his opposition to torture are the two things I recall most about him. For that and his service, I applaud him. RIP John
I have complex feelings about the man, in large part because he so often failed to live up to, at times sullied, those qualities which were most admirable in him. But he was, at his best, worthy of respect, and those on both right and left who are pissing on his metaphorical grave are contemptible jerks.
The torture has ended!
Our endures with a Republican Congress … Trumpistas.
. . . if I notice it.
So…now you’re our righteously concerned nanny?
You are the biggest, worst concern troll that I have ever witnessed:
Oaguaprometa.
Get a life.
AG
. . . (i.e., why not “0”) and justified.
RE: Oui’s serial trolling with the serial lie that “dissent” is what he gets troll-rated for —
In fact, trolling — ^ like that! — is what oui gets troll-rated for. No matter how many times he lies that it’s for “dissent”, it will not change that fact.
A very obvious case-in-point: The comment above that I troll-rated would not have earned a troll-rating (at least not from me) absent that very blatant and dishonest trolling quoted above. Demonstrating again that oui’s lying when he pretends his trolling gets troll-rated for “dissent”, when the fact is that it gets troll-rated because it’s trolling.
You write:
So…you are saying that he is not being troll-rated because his views about the U.S. political system as it stands, he is being troll-rated because…
Because…
Because…what!!!???
And that’s where this whole thing goes off the tracks.
If he…or I, seeing as how the same troll-raters attack us both regularly and often…were to use whatever the totally undefined “trolling” and “lying” tactics you claim but used them in support of the neocentrist-controlled Democratic Party, then would you several repetitive troll-raters still be liberally throwing about “1s” and “0s” with your usual gleeful abandon?
I do not think so.
And why?
Because…among many other things…I seriously doubt that you, malbar, narduk and/or whatever other lurking small-letter constructs there are around here have ever troll-rated centerfielddj, whose blatant lying and/or willful “misunderstanding” in support of the neocentrist DNC’s actions is perfectly plain to see for anyone with unbiased eyes.
You have a point to make?
Great.
Make it, but without your usual Granny No-No lecturing, hectoring and troll-rating.
I dare ya.
Thank you and good night.
AG
. . . that the only stupid question is one you already know the answer to. By that standard, you just asked a surpassingly stupid question:
Asking this question in putative “response” to a comment in which it was already just answered with crystal clarity (part of which answer you actually quoted! — evidently with zero comprehension) is profoundly stupid. Here’s the already-answered answer to your stupid question again, with your penchant for misrepresentation via truncated quotation (i.e., by omitting what “^ like that!” pointed to) again corrected:
Very dishonest trolling, it’s worth pointing out.
Your skepticism towards the easily-verified fact stated above is, of course, a perfectly hilarious confirmation of ag’s Law, i.e.,
Skepticism is appropriate in direct proportion to the weight of the preponderance of the factual evidence for a given proposition
,
as the link above (where you would find 100% factual verification of my statements above that you contested!) demonstrates.
oui, of course, knows all of this already, as it’s been explained to him repeatedly ad nauseum. He consciously chooses (cherishing his martyr complex is, I suspect, the Ockham’s razor explanation for this bizarrely self-defeating behavior) to be troll-rated each time he consciously chooses to serially troll this site with the serial lie that he gets troll-rated for “dissent” instead of for this actual, dishonest trolling.
The other thing I’m pretty confident inflames oui’s rages is that he is largely ignored here (certainly by me!) unless he’s either trolling himself or consciously (by his own admission!), grossly abusing booman’s rating system “pre-empt[ively]” or as “retaliation”.
I repeat:
If all that you say is true about your position, why do you not troll-rate centerfielddj? His “lies” about what I am saying are preposterous!!!
I am some sort of secret Trump agent?
Give me abreak!!!
AG
. . . my position.
And I repeat: all you have to do is click the provided link to verify that conclusively, unequivocally.
And I repeat:
And since you revived that subject, the occasional accountability exercise seems long overdue, so again I repeat:
Having lived in Arizona for over 20 years, was never a fan of McCain. He seemed a grandstanding hypocrite, most of all in love with his own image. Still, I’m grateful that he torpedoed efforts to kill the ACA. Also his efforts to fix our campaign finance laws. My guess is he did all of that to bolster his precious image, but he was on the right side at least on those issues.
However, I know that when push came to shove he was for sale. He would do whatever it took to get elected. In the Senate, if it meant repudiating his former self, he would do it. If it meant putting Palin on the ticket, no problem. If it meant taking money and pedaling influence on behalf of Charles Keating, no problem. If it meant caving to racists in South Carolina, no problem.
I guess an image is difficult to maintain without a high-status position. The man had his priorities.
Didn’t McCain bait and switch the AZ Native Americans out of their land?
Oh.
not allowed to mention uss forestal ? didn’t think so.
Thing I’m noticing the most is that there is a lot of outpouring of support for him from Syrians. He never met a war he didn’t like or want to support, but in this instance it’s hard to ignore that the people probably would have “welcomed us as liberators” for once.
Got evidence for that?
His “anti-torture bills” had loopholes that allowed for the torture practices the CIA conducted to continue because he didn’t support limiting CIA interrogations to the Army Field Manual. I’d call his legislative record on torture “mixed” even if he vocally opposed it. I think words matter even if actions aren’t as pretty, though:
Sen. John McCain’s complicated moral legacy on torture
That thing on torture in there knocks me out of the box. True???
which people? Syria has a lot of different people, only a small minority of which have a high opinion of Americans and even smaller minority of those who would welcome our occupying army.
Occupying army? Considering Syrians generally opposed our drone strikes, I doubt many of the rebels would have supported an occupying army. But they were calling for air support to stop the indiscriminate bombings and barrel bombs.
It’s the same with Libya, which a great majority of Libyans polled supported our intervention, and I think despite the failure to follow up, it’s a better place than Syria. Just saying, I think there needs to be a reckoning with Obama’s failure of a policy or even an articulation of a policy in that arena beyond “kill ISIS”, especially considering we are about to see a massacre in the rebel held area of Idlib, where all the refugees and rebels have been bussed.
Not to be overlooked was his role in getting the Steele dossier directly into Comey’s hands with the pressure of ‘I’ve read this, what are you doing about it’?
His funeral will be, as I suspect he desired it to be, a series of great speeches about reaching for the betterment of politics. They will come down hard on Trumpisms and ask that we remember the spirit of the Law that Trump & his supporters have told us we don’t need.
In his own way, McCain’s last effort will be to deliver his version of the Mueller report with, ironically, the help of his two highest profile opponents.
Marcy seems to think ( I believe) the Dossier is a little dodgy and may have been seeded with disinformation by the Russians. So not sure it is really helpful.
Yes, but really none of the claims in the dossier have been disproven. And it is relevant that McCain was the one that put in the effort to get the dossier and then turned it over to the FBI. That role wasn’t empty, it was important.
You may be right but supposedly that fella Derapaka (sp?) had some input to it and that makes it dicey. It got it all started that is for sure.
Above from Marcy on Jan 18 post. I confess to not following all the data points. But I think it wise to be cautious of what the dossier says owing to her doubts.