Tuesday, July 25, 2017

John McCain's Last Days

Premature?



I don't think there's any question I have no love lost for John McCain, but I don't want to belabor the point that a "war hero" is not necessarily a hero in any other sense. And if you need to remember why John McCain is not someone to be fawning over (even as he's dying - which we all do, sooner or later) - then read these two articles:

WaPo Worships Principled, Humanitarian McCain That’s Never Existed



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:
When Crazytown opened for business in January, not even cynics such as I anticipated a day in which a mortally ill senator would fly back to the Capitol to cast crucial votes on a healthcare law of which nobody knew anything, and that he would do so on the day after the president* of the United States profaned his office (again) by delivering a cheap, political harangue, laced with obscenity, to an audience…of Boy Scouts.

[...]

[Two senators recently on their way back to vote] were genuinely baffled. They had not seen the bill. They did not know what was in it. All they knew was the sub rosa maneuvering that had been going on in order for Mitch McConnell to get the 50 votes he needed simply to open debate. The actual bill was as foreign to them as a clay tablet unearthed from the ruins of Ur. None of them were fluent in the congressional cuneiform in which the majority leader had chosen to pursue his object. And both of them were gobsmacked that it had gotten this far at all. Late Monday night, it was announced that John McCain, recently diagnosed with brain cancer, would fly back to Washington in order to vote on the issue. Thus up in flames went the last vestiges of the novelized John McCain, Country First maverick. He didn't know what he was voting on, either.

  Charles P Pierce

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