There was a time, if memory serves, when I had a certain amount of admiration for John McCain. He fancied himself a straight-shootin' maverick and, before he got beaten by a snot-nosed black guy, he sort of was. I'm sure I couldn't have withstood what he did in Hanoi, even though it clearly left him damaged in more ways than physically.
And so it is that, especially since being beaten by Obama made him feel small, after the desperate need to win led him to choose a running mate, the personal embarrassment from which he'll never admit, the man has had a hard-on for every possible war there could ever be.
Okay, so he has a need to be tough, a belief, maybe, that the best foreign policy is always based on lobbing missiles and putting on the occasional outright invasion. For whatever reason, that's who he is; or has become.
Far as I'm concerned he's made a fool of himself ever since 2008 as he runs to the nearest mike to make the latest outrageous statement about the guy who beat him. But his response to the shoot-down of the airliner is beyond the pale. It's despicable, even for him:
“It’s just been cowardly, it’s a cowardly administration that failed to give the Ukrainians weapons with which to defend themselves,” McCain said.
In John McCain's damaged mind, not responding to every event militarily is cowardice. But it's not just that: he's calling the President of the United States a coward. After the people he seems to revere armed Osama bin Laden back in the day, and the Contras, you'd think it might occur to him that arming one side of a foreign war doesn't always work out. After he palled around in Syria with the terrorists who turned into ISIS, calling them easily identifiable as good, you'd think he might recognize that holding off isn't necessarily cowardice. That it might, in fact, be wisdom. Were it not coming from, well, you know...
Any situation so complicated -- and, despite his and his sock puppet's nonstop claims that foreign policy is easy: all you need to do is arm people or attack people, international crises are always complicated -- will attract all manner of contrasting ideas from all manner of actual or self-appointed experts. But to call a president a coward for not possessing a hair trigger, let alone assuming that somehow, magically, arming the resistance in Ukraine would have prevented the shoot-down, borders on obscenity. From the other side of the dividing line.
I think it's time to call John McCain what he is: a bitter, damaged old man with one and only one arrow left in his quiver. He'll always deserve a measure of respect for surviving his time in Hanoi, and an unreserved pass for breaking down and signing a "confession" there (a big factor, I'd say, in his current psychic turmoil). But it's long past time for people, even the propagandists at Fox "news," to stop considering his opinion on anything worth seeking out and giving air time. He's become a joke. A nasty sick joke.
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