Posted on 08/28/2018 8:17:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
John McCain's exit from life and politics has commentators of all sorts falling into interpretive contortions.
"I opposed him, but..."
"I liked him in spite of..."
It was McCain's gift, springing from personality and life experiences, to antagonize and enrapture, to confound and excite, often at the very same moment. He was neither wholly one thing nor entirely another: neither hardline "conservative" nor "establishment" dupe; neither the selfless public servant incarnate nor the loosey-goosey adherent to some individualistic code.
I admired and twice voted for the man. Even in not-infrequent moments of disagreement, I took care to cut him some slack. I will tell you why. He was, according to my estimate, two distinct things in short supply today: a serious man and a hard-core patriot. If you can't salute those particular attributes, which ones can you salute?
His moral seriousness, embodying a commitment to generosity, decency and right actions, hid behind a mask at times. Despite his physical sufferings as a prisoner of the communist North Vietnamese, McCain was by most accounts a hoot to be around. He didn't mind a little irreverence -- a trait I see as stemming, plausibly, from his deep personal acquaintance with authority, particularly of the military sort. The media for a time ate up all this irreverence with a spoon.
No wonder: There was no Savior of the Nation grandiosity about Sen. John McCain. A man who could laugh at himself -- who could, for instance, kid about the effect of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on his physical profile -- was entitled to some measure of celebrity. He was a different kind of Republican, we were notified, open-minded, friendly, even slightly progressive.
With such press notices he had to be at least a little pleased. Yet not so pleased as to lose his understanding of public service as contractual in nature. The voters had sent him to Washington, D.C. They deserved the best service of which he was capable. That implied the duty of serious attention to public concerns.
Of all public concerns, that which chiefly engaged McCain's attention was national security, underwritten by military preparedness. This was to be expected of a third-generation Navy man. His father and grandfather, as all the obituaries have noticed, were four-star admirals. A sense of duty, and of gratitude, comes embedded in such a legacy -- a sense of appreciation for the sacrifices of others, a realization of the necessity for sacrifices still to come.
Every reader knows of McCain's barbaric treatment by his Vietnamese captors -- a point of which Donald Trump disagreeably made light during the 2016 campaign, claiming personally to like "people who didn't get captured." McCain sustained tortures barely describable -- in part, I guess, for the crime of displeasing an entrepreneur safe at home, attending to business. Mostly, however, it was for the sake of loving America too much to shame her with submission to tyranny and cruelty.
Love of country, in our time, may be the least-fashionable public virtue on public display, and commitment to freedom a relic of an exasperating history dominated by white male patriarchs, slayers of Indians, enslavers of blacks. The John McCain who fell into Vietnamese hands while defending freedom knew better and, throughout his latter career, never gave over his faith in America as the primary carrier of the freedom virus. He offended many in public life by his advocacy of strong, interventionist policies abroad, meant, basically, to reinforce freedom in America itself. He constantly advocated such military spending as seemed requisite to the entirely legitimate (it would seem to me) goal of military predominance in a world teeming with screwballs and America-haters.
There seems ample room to debate the wisdom of this American intervention or that one without discarding the overriding wisdom that projection of national strength warns the screwballs and America-haters to keep their distance. Because if they don't, then they'll run, head-long, into the heirs of John McCain; lovers of freedom and imitators of his worthy example, telling foreign enemies, in McCain-like tones of defiance, just where they can get off.
McCain was no war hero. His busted arms came from the plane crash. And he was put in a camp section for “VIP’s”. The “tortured!” myth is exactly that.
He also bailed from the Forestal BEFORE the fire was out. While his crewmates were fighting it, and dying.
He was, and will always be, a First Class A$$hole. I will visit his grave when this dies down, and give him my own version of discharge.
“I don’t hate McCain personally, it’s more about the hypocritical media than anything. I think McCain got sucked in because of it. He didn’t see how they’d been playing him all those years.”
McCain likely knew what was going on. Some of the the same characters involved in the 2016 campaign were involved with his 2008 campaign. Note the WP an Nation links..
https://downtrend.com/vsaxena/mccain-met-with-russian-oligarch/
I thought this said “Death of a Patriot” until I started to red it and saw it is about McAmnesty so I knew there was some mistake.
A Patriot?
ASK the other wives of POW’s that he refused to even speak to, much less try to help them. He was MORE than rude to them all.
ASK Sarah Palin how she was treated during the 2008 campaign. Read her book for some info on that.
The more popular she got, the more angry & bitter & venal HE got.
Ask the families of the sailors who died when he crashed his fighter jet on the aircraft carrier.....There were over 100 casualties.
Also ask yourself how many millions of dollars of jets he personally crashed & the ones that were totaled in that same crash on the deck of the aircraft carrier-—the taxpayers paid a mighty sum for his incompetence.
A Patriot? He was one of the “Chain of Custody’ of the Steele Dossier which has been used to try & bring down a duly elected President....
Representing Arizona, he loaded that state with illegals & burdened their welfare system supporting those invaders.
Representing Arizona & the whole country, he never would vote for stopping the invasions of illegals into this country.
IF YOU THINK ANY OF THESE ACTIONS ARE PATRIOTIC, I NEED A NEW DICTIONARY.
Every picture I ever say of McCain as a POW didn’t show me a man who was STARVING. The pics of the people released from Buchenwald-—THOSE are STARVING people. John looked no different from his buddy pics next to his airplane.
Please don’t let yourself be confused by the actual facts.
His pall bearers and speakers at the funeral are a bunch of liberals and RINOs.
Like I said, most of us had his number 20 years ago.
Only the horrid RINOs and RATs liked McCain. I wish they would hurry up and get his burial over quick so we can forget about him.
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