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Did Richard Nixon pardon John “Songbird” McCain of charges as serious as treason and did our defunct mainstream media hide this horrific side of a man who would have been our president in 2008, save only for a Black being on the ticket? What is the truth here? “Colonel Ted Guy was preparing criminal charges against John McCain when Nixon took Admiral McCain’s little boy under his wing. Where are McCain’s 32 propaganda tapes that were made during Vietnam and broadcast over the radio to US troops?” asks Gordon Duff, a disabled, Marine combat veteran of Vietnam writing about the...

A recent poll found that more Republican voters have a favorable view of presidential candidate Donald Trump than they do of Arizona's long-time U.S. Senator, John McCain. The telephone survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports polled 1,000 people on July 20 and 21 and revealed that at least 52 percent of likely Republican voters reported having at least a somewhat favorable view of Trump, while 51 percent feel that way about McCain. The margin of error for the study, +/- 3 percent, is greater than the difference in results, but when asked if they have a very favorable view of the...

Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.

John Kerry has made a number of contradictory claims about what exactly he signed up for when he signed up for the Swift boats. I cite various primary sources in an attempt to discover what it was that Kerry actually signed up for. In summary, when Kerry signed up for the Swift boats, they were used as coastal patrol boats and were one of the safest assignments in Vietnam. Two weeks into Kerry's Swift Boat assignment, they decided to use the boats on the Mekong river. Kerry and his supporters have made multiple contradictory claims about his Swift boat service...

“None of that is true!. . .I used to meet with him (McCain) in my office at the end of the day and debate with him. . .we debated quite fiercely but there was never any personal prejudice between us; the debate was between two men in a manly style. But after that we were quite friendly. We didn’t take it personally,” said Tran Trong Duyet, McCain’s jailer, in 2008 when Duyet was aged 75. But after his release from the Hanoi Hilton (Hoa Lo Prison), John Sidney McCain, Navy pilot and son of Adm. John McCain, Jr., commander of...

In a poll conducted from July 17th to July 20th, support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump hasn’t taken a hit despite Trump’s comments about Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Saturday, July 18th, while attending the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. A recent Morning Consult poll reveals Trump leads all of the GOP contenders, with 22 percent of the vote. This places Trump seven percentage points ahead of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who held 15 percent of the vote. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker came in third place with 12 percent of the vote. According to the poll, Dr. Ben...

The Journal calls it Trump’s attempt to make peace with the GOP after two days of heavy breathing over the McCain comments. It’s not an apology, but Mediaite is right that it’s probably as close as he gets to an apology. Which is good, because only RINOs apologize. He insists here that he didn’t really say what everyone heard him say this past weekend about McCain, which is interesting given that Trump fans have spent the last three days claiming that what he said was correct. Trump keeps pointing in interviews to this “fact check” by Sharyl Attkisson, who took...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Donald Trump's incendiary comments - and the GOP response - are proving political gold for Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid jumped on both Tuesday, first attacking Trump for his criticism of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., then pivoting to a larger target: the growing GOP presidential field and the entire Republican Party. Reid, D-Nev., noted that while Trump's GOP White House rivals were nearly unanimous in denouncing Trump's suggestion that McCain is not really a war hero, they were more tentative in responding to his criticisms of Mexican immigrants as "criminals" and "rapists."(continued)

Though he immediately backtracked, presidential candidate Donald Trump reopened the controversy over Sen. John McCain’s service during the Vietnam War and his subsequent handling of the post-war POW issue by questioning whether the Arizona Republican should be regarded as a hero. McCain, whose father and grandfather were four-star Navy admirals, has been commended throughout his career in the Senate for enduring five-and-a-half years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison in North Vietnam. But various critics, including Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sydney H. Schanberg, have charged that McCain, working with fellow Vietnam veteran and then-Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., suppressed information about...

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle. Since then, however, Hanoi has transformed itself more dramatically than almost any other city in the world. Today, the city is an explosive...

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday vowing to defy American policies in the region despite a deal with world powers over Tehran's nuclear program was "very disturbing".

There are heroes and then there are charlatans. To detect who is which requires one to observe over time the sincerity of the person. Here are described the acts of one true American hero: ADMIRAL JAMES B. STOCKDALE The President of the United States in the name of The Congress takes pleasure in presenting the Medal of Honor to STOCKDALE, JAMES B.Rank and organization: Rear Admiral (then Captain), U.S. Navy. Place and date: Hoa Lo prison, Hanoi, North Vietnam, 4 September 1969. Entered service at: Abingdon, Ill. Born: 23 December 1923, Abingdon, Ill..Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the...

Don’t be sure the McCain episode is the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s bizarre presidential campaign. Don’t even be sure it’s the end of the beginning. Attacking him with censure and shame is like trying to destroy Godzilla with electricity: It might just make him stronger. Why should anyone pay the slightest attention to the Trump circus? Because the most recent polls — to the GOP establishment’s great consternation — show him in first place. Also because Trump, rather than any of his more experienced rivals, is setting the agenda for the race. On Saturday, he committed what...

Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks real-estate mogul Donald Trump is a “jackass” and his comments about Sen. John McCain were the beginning of the end of his candidacy. “He’s bringing his name down and he’s not helping the process and he shouldn’t be commander in chief,” Graham said. The South Carolina senator was speaking on CNN’s “Out Front” on Monday, responding to Trump’s Saturday comment that McCain was not an American hero because he was taken prisoner by North Vietnamese forces. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who...

...His jet was hit by ground fire, and David was forced to eject, parachuting into a valley near a village. As his parachute deployed, his wingman watched him descend, and saw him captured as he landed. David’s capture in Laos was published in a North Vietnamese newspaper, Quan Nahn Dan... One of the committees I testified before was the 1992 Senate Select Committee Hearings on POW/MIA. John Kerry and John McCain did everything to keep the truth from coming out and ignored all the evidence. Three former Secretaries of Defense testified that men had been left behind, but Kerry and...

What could Donald Trump have been thinking when he said John McCain was not a war hero? Certainly he must have known it would lead to the end of a political career – but the question now is: Whose political career? The media – even the putatively conservative New York Post – is gleefully saying, “Trump is toast after insult: ‘McCain not a war hero’ Don Voyage!” Is this true; or is this media wishful thinking so they can go back to telling us how wonderful Jeb Bush is? Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing in all walks of life...

What has gone underplayed in today's widespread outrage over Donald Trump's dismissal of John McCain's war heroism is that the GOP national-poll front-runner's comments, besides demonstrating an idiocratic lack of basic human judgment and decency, are also dead wrong. Because this is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a vulgar anti-intellect who cannot string a coherent paragraph together, his full statement contradicts itself several times within 57 short words. So let's just focus on the bolded part from his remarks: He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured—OK, I...

The Iran nuclear deal that could prevent a war must have evoked another deal to end a war almost 50 years ago in the Secretary of State.John Kerry was angry. “Listen to this. Listen to what Trump just said about John McCain,” Kerry was saying over the phone. “ ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.’ ” “That’s unbelievable,” Kerry said. “That’s beyond outrageous.” “John and I have some serious differences on a lot of things but he is nothing other than a hero and a good man....

Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.