John McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years. That’s a long stretch in a third world prison, particularly when it’s in a country that’s been under sustained withering attack from a superpower for longer than that. He was abused, and that was reprehensible – prisoners should not be maltreated or deliberately deprived of proper care, nutrition, etc. I am against mistreatment and torture regardless of who is being subjected to it, and McCain was far from the worst; just a cog in a genocidal war machine that he eventually came close to seeing as inappropriately applied in that conflict. And late in life, he admitted that the Iraq war had been a “mistake” and expressed regret for his part in bringing it about.
Those are the two best things I can say about the late senior senator from Arizona. The fact is, he spent his entire political career pressing for war every time the opportunity arose; it was central to his brand. He simply never met a war he didn’t like, from Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America and elsewhere, to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, you name it. He was pressing for direct American involvement in the Syrian civil war early on. And in spite of his celebrated vote against the Obamacare repeal, he has supported Trump’s legislative agenda more than eighty percent of the time, most notably voting to pass the $1.5T tax giveaway to the richest people in the country – a bill that also hobbled the ACA by canceling the mandate.
Of course, the mainstream news media reference none of this in their wall-to-wall coverage of his passing, preferring to expound endlessly on what a peerless leader of men McCain was. MSNBC’s amnesia regarding this topic is breathtaking. I clearly remember his 2008 presidential campaign, and it was full of divisive rhetoric, particularly what emanated from his crackpot vice presidential pick, Sara Palin. McCain, too, made rally speeches about how Obama was not like you and me. He obsessed about Russia in Georgia (note: a chief foreign policy advisor was on Georgia’s payroll at the time) and advocated for a federal spending freeze when the financial crisis hit – a Hoover-esque move that would have brought on another great depression. And yet with all this (and much else), MSNBC only shows that one moment in that one rally when McCain shut down some crazy old racist with a clumsily bigoted rejoinder about how Obama was not an “Arab” but, rather, a good family man.
I could go on, but seriously … the point is that the corporate media loved McCain and were incapable of reporting on him honestly. That they would continue spinning the maverick myth even after he’s gone should surprise no one.
luv u,
jp
