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Good grief...the left demonized him simply because he wasn't left.
Moron
McCain Feingold bill in 2000 led to the Citizens United ruling, he was warned by several people that this bill was going to backfire on the country, yet McCain pushed it forward. From that moment on I knew McCain was either deceptive or not too bright, I would never vote for such a person. McCain like many politicians served himself well.
McCain Feingold bill in 2000 led to the Citizens United ruling, he was warned by several people that this bill was going to backfire on the country, yet McCain pushed it forward. From that moment on I knew McCain was either deceptive or not too bright, I would never vote for such a person. McCain like many politicians served himself well.
Yes, how dare he actually want to do something about the rich buying our politics.
Fuck, let's just go ahead and auction off our offices, like the Ancient Romans did. That turned out well for them.
You see how well McCain and his bill worked out for us, he led us to the Citizens United debacle. McCain-Feingold got us to the point that only the rich could get elected, how is that working for you?
John McTumor won’t have a legacy. He only mattered to his family. All this handwringing by the news, and because it’s PC to handwring, y’all is stupid.
His final words to the American people state clearly, all one needs to know about McCain. He was a dyed in the wool globalist to the end. One cannot be a globalist, AND put their country first. He made his choice.He chose his words. May he be remembered for both....
Now that John McCain is dead we must wonder how will he be remembered in history? Will the history be recorded factually, or will his story be more a myth?
Most Americans forget or never knew there were always two John McCains: the vision of a selfless, honorable statesman who wasn’t afraid to fight the establishment, and the one that the rest of us actually got, which was none of those things.
We already have an indication of whether his legacy will be fact or myth, from the plethora of tributes pouring in from McCain’s political allies and former opponents such as President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, not to mention McCain’s many, many friends in the media.
For much of his career (and particularly after his 2000 presidential bid), the media played a willing role in helping McCain to craft his reputation as a political “maverick” and honorable statesman. There’s a simple reason for this, apart from his status as a war hero: McCain was always willing to give the media access, the thing it craves above all.
The grateful media rewarded McCain with a shower of appreciation for doing the bare minimum, such as when he shot down supporters at a town hall in 2008 who attacked then-Senator Barack Obama. (Even that incident is more complicated than you might remember.) And no one appreciated the media’s desire for a drama-filled narrative more than McCain himself.
When the GOP nearly repealed the Affordable Care Act last year, he concealed his position until the moment he actually cast his vote. And before he voted to help sink the bill, he told reporters: “Watch the show.” The “show” was healthcare coverage for 22 million people.
Of course, McCain’s willingness to do only the bare minimum, rare as it was, did set him apart from his Republican colleagues at times. He bucked his party after 9/11 by opposing the use of torture. As most people up to date on current events remember, one of the last major acts of his life, was to urge the Senate to reject the confirmation of CIA director Gina Haspel, who oversaw torture.
However, further back in history, McCain was implicated in the Keating Five scandal. But, since it his was early in his political career, Senate’s official report found that his conduct did nothing more than “reflect poor judgment.” Perhaps due to that lesson, he became a fierce advocate for campaign finance reform. He joined liberal Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, and the two of them led the way to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. It’s questionable how effective it actually was, but in a post-Citizens United world, it can be seen as, at the very least, an attempt to head off the influence large donors now hold over the political process.
Unfortunately, these policy stances all grew out of McCain’s reaction to his personal history of being tortured during the Vietnam War, and because his career in the Senate was nearly ended over political contributions.
As he realized his death was imminent, he once again did the bare minimum, he voted against his party’s effort to repeal the ACA. But we must wonder again, did he vote against the bill out of compassion for the countless Americans who would have died as a result? After all, he was one of the obstructionists in G”NO”P who fought against the creation of Obamacare in the first place. So, will his vote to save the ACA contribute to his true legacy or his myth?
To most people his legacy will be that of a hero and a patriot, and someone who put country over party. That narrative is given a tremendous boost since McCain died while the idiot trump is in the White House.
And, there is no escaping that those who love McCain the most will be the ones who write his legacy. So the inevitable myth they compose will obscure the evidence that the sum total of his career was harmful to the country and the larger world around it.
Most Americans prefer to believe there is a solemn respect for war and soldiers, and that it a bipartisan area of agreement in this country. But the sad truth is, the wars the U.S. now fight are mostly ignored by the media, and so too, the public.
In reality, it is only after their deaths when veterans are truly honored and acknowledged, until then, most veterans go unnoticed by the public. It was only McCain’s political position that kept the public aware of his history as a prisoner who was tortured during the Vietnam War. Without it, his career in politics would likely never have happened. With his death it is the top line of his obituary.
McCain military experience in Vietnam was that of great suffering, but he was not alone. However, his time there is a real and substantial part of his legacy.
Sadly, his deeply personal experience with the brutality of an unnecessary war did not interfere with him being the Iraq War’s biggest, loudest cheerleader outside of the Bush administration. McCain relied on his war hero status to lend credence to the invasion and subjecting another generation of soldiers to another horrible, pointless conflict.
The New York Times wrote in a 2008 review of McCain’s actions and statements after 9/11:
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“Within hours [of 9/11], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.
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Within a month he made clear his priority. ‘Very obviously Iraq is the first country,’ he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: ‘Next up, Baghdad!?’ “
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He pushed the war even after it became clear to all but those with the rosiest-colored glasses that it was an abject failure. McCain only admitted in his final memoir, written when he was practically on his deathbed, that the war “can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”
But, even though he recognized that this adventure in regime change was a “mistake” that led to the destabilizing of an entire region, and resulted in the deaths of well over a million people, McCain completely ignored the lessons of that colossal failure. He continued his nearly career-long desire for a war with Iran, as he heaped praise on the idiot trump’s “strategy” in sabotaging the Iran nuclear deal. (It says much that the last honor of McCain’s life which was bestowed up on him was his fellow senators’ decision to name the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 after him.)
Regrettably, the Iran deal was not the only time where McCain found common cause with the idiot trump, a man he’s feuded for years. Unlike his role in sinking the repeal of Obamacare, McCain was one of the key votes to support the idiot trump‘s tax scam last December, which will undeniably hurt any American who isn’t very rich. His vote for a hastily written bill that will drastically increase the deficit also came after over a decade of concern trolling about the deficit and months of pleading for a return to “regular order” in the Senate. The tax law McCain voted for also killed the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, the same law McCain had gotten so much credit for saving just months earlier.
Continuing the list of instances when McCain hurt the American people by helping the idiot trump is his major roll in the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. McCain whined during that entire process that Democrats might try to block his confirmation. Had McCain forgotten that, during the 2016 campaign, he promised that the Republicans would be unified in blocking anyone Hillary Clinton might put up for the job.
In all, McCain voted with the the idiot trump administration’s stated position 83 percent of the time, despite the fact that he had known for over a year that he was dying and would never have to face angry Republican voters again.
An appreciation of McCain also would not be complete without noting that he helped to normalize the far right element of the Republican Party with his selection of then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. McCain only disclosed in his recent memoir that he regretted his choice of Palin. (He said his own personal preference would have been former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman. After all, Lieberman was just as fervent about the Iraq War as McCain himself.) But as with so many other decisions made over the course of his career, McCain’s choice was driven by political expediency and his loyalty to a party that has continuously moved further and further right after McCain’s campaign gave Palin’s insanity a national platform.
McCain’s political legacy should be that he consistently vacillated between doing the right thing doing the opposite, and almost every single time decided on the opposite. He should be remembered as a man who was a willing and active participant in the destruction of one country, and a man who helped the racist, authoritarian right rise in his own. What John McCain’s legacy will be, however, is the one crafted by the reporters and peers who loved him, who bought hook, line, and sinker that McCain was a different kind of politician, and not the fraud he actually was.
The Reagan myth can be an outline to help McCain’s biographers use alternative facts, tall tales, and outright lies to create a myth second only to that of Reagan's.
The idiot trump's devoted fans will find it difficult to decide whether to support their orange-hued hero's hatred of McCain, or, defend his memory against the truth contained in this OP because he was a Republican. Either way, their responses will deserve no reply.
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Interestingly enough, and unrelated to your overall point, it wasn't the Senate legislation written by McCain-Feingold that was signed into law. It was the House version, authored by Chris Shays, that became law.McCain Feingold bill in 2000 led to the Citizens United ruling, he was warned by several people that this bill was going to backfire on the country, yet McCain pushed it forward. From that moment on I knew McCain was either deceptive or not too bright, I would never vote for such a person. McCain like many politicians served himself well.
Yes, how dare he actually want to do something about the rich buying our politics.
Fuck, let's just go ahead and auction off our offices, like the Ancient Romans did. That turned out well for them.
You see how well McCain and his bill worked out for us, he led us to the Citizens United debacle. McCain-Feingold got us to the point that only the rich could get elected, how is that working for you?
You see how well McCain and his bill worked out for us, he led us to the Citizens United debacle. McCain-Feingold got us to the point that only the rich could get elected, how is that working for you?
Then we need to pass another law that will pass muster... not a big deal.
Pass a law that allows public funding of campaigns, so working class people can compete with the rich.
McCain Feingold wasn't the problem here.. the rich buying politicians is.
