The Iraq War Should Be a Much Bigger Part of McCain’s Legacy Than His ‘Civility’
The “straight talk” people praise McCain for is actually what most of them can’t stand about politicians:
They say noble words but cast ignoble votes.
too few people asked:
Do real Arabs not make “decent family men” or citizens?
Can one not have principled “disagreements” with them?
More concretely:
McCain was then campaigning on a pledge to expand the Iraq war,
which he’d championed from the beginning.
That war had killed perhaps a million Arabs.
It would lead later to a devastating occupation by ISIS, and yet more U.S. military intervention.
Throwing an entire ethnic group under the bus may not have been McCain’s intent, though he’d had his brushes with bigotry before.
For years he referred to East Asians by a Vietnam-era slur,
opposed making MLK Day a holiday, and
reportedly had a habit of calling women, even his wife, the c-word.
Mostly, though, McCain was a reliable vote for his party’s worst ideas,
and contributed many of his own (like putting Sarah Palin a heartbeat from the presidency). And despite his well-known feud with President Trump, he voted in support of the president’s agenda 83 percent of the time.
McCain supported the $2 trillion corporate tax giveaway that could tear our safety net to shreds.
His unrelenting passion for military conflict was a thing of caricature (“bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” he famously sang).
And his support for empire-crumbling military budgets was so renowned that his colleagues named this year’s $717 billion atrocity after him.
in emphasizing McCain’s personal style over his actual politics,
his eulogizers imply
there’s some “honorable” way to implement an agenda like Trump’s (or 83 percent of it, anyway),
as long as you don’t talk like Trump himself.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2...y-his-civility

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