I would point out that the phrase “let a thousand flowers bloom” has been around long before Mao’s speech. It was used for instance in Vannevar Bush’s commission report “Science, the endless frontier” which lead to the establishment of Office of Naval Research. Given the cold war winning technologies that came out of ONR, I would find it hard to think of them as a “communist front.”
First, you deserve the "Obscure Name-Drop Reference Of The Week" award. I have one of Dr. Bush's books in my library, I know exactly who he was, and I therefore understand that your attempted allusion is irrelevant. This is a political and philosophical issue, not a scientific one.
From a logic perspective, it's an interesting "datum" which has no correlation to the decades-long pattern of utterly revealing and absolutely damning "data" which comprises John McCain's words and deeds throughout his public political career.
Your "datum" is an irrelevant outlier and attempt to distract and focus attention on that irrelevancy instead of connecting the dots of all the other "data" and the pattern thus revealed.