The Chris Moeller Archives

The truth about John McCain

The beatification continues on at least three different 24-hour-a-day news channels for the recently-deceased six-term Arizona senator and American militarist John McCain. Upon his death, the conservative Republican is being cast by both Democrats and Republicans as the anti-Trump, which effectively, and at long last, entombs the one-time self-described "maverick" as the establishment politician he's always been. His political base was always the Washington press corps.

Rather than being the anti-Trump, McCain was really more of a forerunner. The opening act. Aside from unleashing Sarah Palin onto the world, using her as his attack dog in an openly-racist presidential campaign against Barack Obama, effectively launching each of the "tea party," "birther," and nativist movements, and then never apologizing for any of it, McCain suffered from an often uncontrollable temper and popularized the name-calling that Trump would later make his metier. McCain referred to political opponents as "shitheads," "assholes," and one time at least, "a fucking jerk." In 1992, in front of reporters in Arizona, he answered some gentle kidding from his wife, Cindy, about the thinning hair on the top of his head with the line, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." A teenage Chelsea Clinton was "ugly," his Vietnam captors were unapologetically "gooks," and anti-war protesters, specifically pacifist Code Pink activists, were "low-life scum" because they called for the arrest of the American war criminal Henry Kissinger. I guess that's some Teddy Roosevelt-style plain talk.

McCain idolized Theodore Roosevelt. The 26th President of the United States was his political hero. And as a committed student of history, McCain adopted Roosevelt's imperialist designs for the world and popularized them for new generations a century later. He lobbied relentlessly for the war on Iraq, the war on Afghanistan, "surge" strategies and drone bombing under President Obama, and an apartheid government in Israel. Upon the death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, McCain called the authoritarian monarch "an advocate of peace" even during the Saudis' slaughter of Yemenis (a still-largely unacknowledged global crisis that continues today). McCain was a Cold Warrior in the strongest, most historically potent sense of the phrase when it came to political relations with Russia. He supported right wing contra death squads in Central America and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, both in his steadfast opposition to communism. He flew to war zones all over the world with news cameras always close behind. When arriving in Syria and Libya, he recruited affiliates of al Qaeda as allies. In Ukraine, he did battle with Vladimir Putin and Russia by forming U.S. alliances with actual neo-Nazis. These three countries-- Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, are just three locations where McCain was committed to replacing independent-minded governments with sectarian and/or fascist militarists. As much as any American "statesman," he pushed to militarize the peaceful resistance movement to Assad in Syria, arming and financing ISIS, causing a bloodbath as well as one of the worst refugee crises in memory. Strange to consider now but Sarah Palin told us a decade ago that it was Barack Obama who "palled around with terrorists."

The traditional news media and McCain's political partners, nearly all of them career climbers, and the Democrats among them now moving into full-time status as neoconservative Bush Republicans, overlook all of this dirt on McCain because they share the senator's belief that American military interventions amount to a great gift from our country to the rest of the world. They share his outlook that the world is a chessboard and those that are dead from these excursions by the world's most powerful military but that are not also Americans, are merely statistics. The perfect encapsulation of McCain's status at home was the newser on Monday during which Washington reporters shouted over a summit between President Trump and the President of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta demanding that Trump explain why he would not lower the White House flag to half-staff to honor the death of McCain.

The news media loves this narrative-- McCain as the anti-Trump. McCain was that in only one sense-- that he took the exact opposite tack with the media that Trump does. Instead of campaigning against the deeply unpopular national news outlets, he coddled and flattered them. This was a strategy no less brilliant than Trump's even though McCain never reached the White House and had the unfortunate timing to campaign against Obama rather than Hillary Clinton after he secured the Republican nomination for president. He signed off on nearly every Trump policy over the last two years, yet managed to conflate himself publicly as a principled opponent of the president, even seeing to it before he died that Trump not be allowed to speak at his funeral. His famous "thumbs down" vote in the Senate chamber, crossing party lines to cast the deciding vote to "save Obamacare," was really just, we should all recognize, a nod to save Romneycare, a legislative requirement to purchase shitty private insurance and delay the promise of national health insurance for God knows how long. But wow, the drama on the floor that day. News reporters don't get cinematic moments like that very often working the political beat. Meanwhile, Arizona's senior senator was right down the Trump Republican middle on the horrendous tax bill and pretty much every other initiative of the president up until the time of his death. McCain received public kudos from the left for being a Republican that acknowledges human-impacted climate change, but did he ever cast a vote to limit the steamroller of capitalism? In Arizona in 2014, he saw to the privatization and industrialization of Tonto National Forest, holy ground to the Apaches and land that had been previously protected by two different Republican presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

If Jim Garrison was right and fascism will come to us under the name of national security, John McCain did more than his share to hurry this inevitability. His legacy as an "American hero" was secure as soon as he was taken prisoner in Hanoi, the point from which he was forever after praised for his courage. He had been captured by the Viet Minh while running 23 bombing missions against a formerly-enslaved people that wanted self-autonomy and never attacked the United States. Only his capture ensured that he didn't run a 24th mission. (And a reminder to some of you here that the "doing your duty" argument went out at Nuremberg and when McCain was still in short pants. At the Tribunal in Germany, it was firmly established that "crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.") John McCain took that story of courage back home and turned it into a long, dishonest, and horrifically bloody political career. Throughout his life he saw honor and glory in carnage and death, which makes him a victim as well as a perpetrator. But anti-war protesters tried telling him differently and he didn't listen. It wasn't just the news media that he enthralled, but they helped him out a great deal. He found a way to play us all like gullible fools.

posted by CM @ 9:52 PM