John McCain, Political Weathervane, Blows With the Wind

John McCain unwittingly planted some seeds of irony last year that have now sprouted. At the time, summer 2015, McCain openly bemoaned the xenophobic demagoguery of Donald Trump. Trump came to Arizona, McCain's state, to do some rabble-rousing among white racists, towing behind him as a stage prop the father of a person murdered by an undocumented (aka “illegal”) immigrant. [1]

The political mobilization of white racist xenophobes in Arizona presented a threat to McCain, because of his vulnerability to an extremist far-rightwing challenger in the Republican primary for his U.S. Senate seat. (U.S. Senate terms last 6 years, and McCain is running for reelection for a 6th term this November.)

McCain fretted of Trump's agitprop rally that “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me. Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.” “We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” in Arizona. “Now he galvanized them. He’s really got them activated.”

These are the comments that irked the schoolyard bully Trump, prompting him to denigrate McCain for only being called a hero for being “captured,” making McCain a “loser” in Trump's eyes. (As Trump avoided the draft, and certainly didn't volunteer, he was never in any danger of capture and possible Loserhood himself. It was mostly the poor and other lower economic classes who were subjected to impressment into the U.S. military to attack Indochina. McCain was descended from a military family and entered the U.S. Naval Academy to pursue a career as a navy officer, later finding politics more to his taste.)

Now here are some excerpts from an article in a haute bourgeois U.S. publication that ran in July of last year. I have highlighted certain phrases:

McCain is an ardent backer of his good friend Senator Lindsey Graham, who is languishing in the G.O.P. Presidential primary polls. He noted that Graham has been one of the few Republicans to condemn Trump in strong terms. On Sunday, Graham said on CNN, “I think [Trump]’s a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community, and we need to push back.” He added that Republicans “need to reject this demagoguery. If we don’t, we will lose, and we will deserve to lose.”

McCain, who is eighteen years older than Graham, sounded like a proud father. “Lindsey said this is a moral test for our party. He put on a very strong performance,” McCain said. “Of course, Lindsey was one of the eight of us who negotiated immigration reform. Lindsey never backed away from it.”
McCain, who had a testy relationship with Senator Marco Rubio, another member of the Gang of Eight who is running for President, couldn’t resist adding, “Rubio backed away from it.”

I noted that Rubio, like many other Republican politicians, has been hard to follow on the issue and no longer supports the compromise approach that the Gang of Eight took in 2013: combining a pathway to citizenship and tough new border measures in a single bill. McCain licked his finger, held it up in the air, and laughed.

“You know that old song from before you were born?” McCain said, speaking of the Bob Dylan classic “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” [2]

Indeed.

So McCain, who hops on the Trump bandwagon, laughed at Rubio as someone who, like a weathervane, points in whatever direction the political winds are blowing. Note that McCain's political compadre Graham, and the Bushes, and Mitt Romney, and many other prominent Republicans, have publicly disavowed Trump. And McCain said Amen to Graham's call to resist the demagoguery of Trump. Not just as a political necessity, but as a “moral test.”

Read my previous essay, just below, about McCain, and see if you can spot more ironies. [“John McCain Has No Pride.”] 

As they say in those English-speaking isles across the Atlantic, Cheers!

1] Trump and his ilk have been raising a terrible stink about two murders committed by non-citizens present in the U.S. without permission. Given that there are an estimated 11 million such people here (out of an estimated population of 315 million), no one should be shocked if some of them commit murder. There were 16,121 homicides in the U.S. in 2013, according to the CDC. (Over two-thirds of the homicides were committed with firearms, by the way.) Doubtless the vast majority were the crimes of U.S. citizens. But of course racism and xenophobia are impervious to rational thought, so this is a case of, in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, “facts are stupid things.”

Or in the satirical stylings of comedian Steve Colbert, “truthiness” trumps mere truth. Because emotions are stronger than reason, feelings are more vivid, thus “truer,” than facts, which are intellectual abstractions. You could say that much of the problems of humanity are rooted in this basic structural and existential fact of the mind/psyche. We have (some of us, anyway) rational capability, but it is very hard to be rational, to live guided by reason.

2] “John McCain Has a Few Things to Say About Donald Trump,” New Yorker, July 16, 2015.

The new logo for the Republican Party. (Replaces the elephant, an intelligent, brave, loyal creature unjustly besmirched by involuntary association with the Gang Of Plunderers.)

 

John McCain Has No Pride

U.S. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona is endorsing the man who sneered that McCain wasn't really a war hero, he was only a hero "because he was captured" and then gratuitously added "I like people that weren't captured," callously brushing aside with contempt McCain's five and a half years of captivity in Vietnam. I refer, of course, to one Donald J. Trump, Billionaire Narcissist, Sociopath, and Dangerous Demagogue. [1]

McCain has already been a Senator for almost 3 decades, and is 79 years old, yet is so desperate to stay in the Senate that he is willing to demean himself this way because, it was reported, he fears the white bigots (my term) who dominate Arizona politics (especially Republican primaries) and who are infatuated with Trump. (These are people he previously referred to as "crazies" being riled up by Trump, which provoked Trump The Bully to then piss on McCain's war record.) Even a militarist and hard right-winger like McCain fears being unseated by someone even more extreme in a GOP Senate primary.

McCain's inseparable partner in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, won't endorse Trump because, he says, Trump called McCain "a loser for being captured" and Trump said nice things about Vladimir Putin, The Bogeyman of Russia.

McCain is a man who actually has already had some practice in pride-swallowing concomitant to hailing someone who humiliated him. In 2000 he ran against George W. "Warrior" Bush for the GOP presidential nomination. In order to destroy McCain in white racist South Carolina, the Bush gang, under the direction of the Machiavellian Karl Rove, spread the rumor that McCain had a secret, "illegitimate" black child. The "dirty trick" worked. Loser McCain fell in line behind Bush, ultimately. [2]

This is the man the corporate propaganda system dressed up for public consumption as a "straight-shooter" and "maverick," a man who marched to his own drummer.

If what it takes to be a Republican Senator is this sort of self-abnegation, then the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) must be recognized as having cultlike properties, forcing its acolytes to surrender their self-respect in return for acceptance by the group and for power. (The classic existential situation of selling one's soul to the devil for temporal gain.) In place of self-respect is substituted ersatz self-respect, namely arrogant self-regard, and vanity. These are brittle, shallow psychic properties which render the individual psychologically vulnerable, and thus even more manipulable by the cult.

This sacrifice of the human self in return for a share of power is a key mechanism by which anti-human power systems like the U.S. perpetuate themselves.

 McCain was "heroic" enough to bomb the Vietnamese, which was immoral, but politically and ethically he's now proven himself to be a Profile in Cowardice.

John Sidney McCain III has been a U.S. Senator since January, 1987; 29 years. He will be 80 years old in August. Still, he apparently cannot abide the thought of leaving the Senate. McCain, it seems, is a man who will degrade himself in order to be a Senator for Life. [3] 


1] Trump's classic sociopathic traits include his cunning instinct for homing in on others' vulnerabilities, and his indifference to the interests and feelings of others in pursuit of his own advancement.

2] Yes, South Carolina is that racist. One would think that such a despicable ploy would boomerang on the perpetrators. Au contraire, mon amis! Nor do such tactics earn opprobrium from the Chatterocracy of the corporate propaganda system (aka "the media). Hell, if treasonous actions such as Nixon sabotaging the Paris peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam in 1968 (by advising South Vietnamese dictator Thieu to boycott them) and Reagan arranging for Iran to hold on to the "hostages" in 1980 until Carter's last day in office are kept "secret" with the connivance of the bourgeois blatherariat, what's a little sexual/racial smearing? It's not as if U.S. power elites have high ethical standards (their obnoxious pretentions to same notwithstanding). [The underhanded method Rove used to plant the idea of "McCain's illegitimate black daughter" in people's heads was a push poll. Lee Atwater was another GOP political thug who used the same technique in 1980.]

Bush is a war hero in his own right, having spent the Vietnam war in a safe stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard, secured for him by his daddy, a posting from which he went AWOL (absent without leave-that's military jargon). He also flew in a jet which landed on an aircraft carrier in 2003 and proclaimed Victory in the invasion of Iraq. ("Mission Accomplished," proclaimed a boastful banner suspended from the carrier's superstructure, photogenically strung behind the rostrum placed on the carrier deck from which Bush addressed the assembled sailors and airmen.)

Yet Bush's self-serving evasion of "service" to the murderous U.S. imperialist project in Indochina is far preferable to what McCain did. McCain was a very avid bomber of Vietnam, as we know from his own and others' accounts. He asked for a combat assignment, and helped bomb North Vietnam from a navy aircraft carrier as part of Operation Rolling Thunder during the Johnson regime. After an accident on the carrier injured him and put the ship out of action, he got himself transferred to another carrier so he could keep bombing. Shot down over Hanoi on his 23rd bombing mission, he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured at first. (Although what was done to him wouldn't be considered "torture" if the U.S. were doing it to prisoners.)

3] McCain's father and grandfather both rose to the rank of 4-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. McCain, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at the bottom of his class, achieved the rank of captain, equivalent to a colonel in the other main three branches of the U.S. military (army, air force, and Marine Corps.).

"Sen. John McCain sticking with GOP nominee Trump," Arizona Republic, May 6, 2016.

"Now I'm endorsing HIM?? I'll do ANYTHING to stay a Senator until I die!" 

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