In Defense of Donald Trump’s Slam on John McCain
John McCain is a prick. It’s true.
We have to acknowledge that out of the gate because media coverage of the controversy over Donald Trump’s slam on McCain omits the fact that McCain baited Trump.
McCain started it.
McCain always starts it.
First McCain went after Trump’s anti-immigration supporters, calling them “crazies.” McCain has a long history of denigrating his political opponents’ mental health.
For many years his phrase of choice was “wacko birds,” or just wackos for short.
The fact that McCain has gotten away with his slurs for so many years is a tribute to hownon-litigious American society really is. Libel lawyers love it when someone calls their clients crazy. It’s one of those classic defamatory attacks that makes a libel lawsuit a cakewalk. This pays off a lot of lawyers’ yachts.
What’s amazing is that John McCain never gotten sued.
This essay is in defense of Donald Trump’s slam on McCain and other comments about the Vietnam War that Trump made this weekend.
The Donald Trump vs. John McCain battle was inevitable.
John McCain starts fights and never apologizes. Donald Trump, in this case, fights back and never apologizes. Game on!
I’m not going to join the national pile-on over Trump’s ad-lib speaking style, his refusal to hire a professional campaign staff, his hair or his nativist remarks about Mexican rapists. Mainstream corporate media has that well in hand.
But the media is declaring Trump politically dead, even though he is running No. 1 in the polls.
Worse, the media is always hard-pressing a meme I find disturbing: that no one should cover his campaign for president. Or that it ought to be relegated, as the Huffington Posthas officially done, to the entertainment section of the news.
What?
Pot, meet kettle. Arianna Huffington, meet Donald Trump.
Trump’s comment was that McCain isn’t a war hero because he allowed himself to be captured by the North Vietnamese. Trump’s refusal to apologize for what he said runs contrary to the “all of our sainted troops are glorious heroes” militarist narrative.
Since 9/11, that narrative has been the gospel of both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the national news media.
Until Trump, no major public figure has dared to attack a high-profile military veteran, especially an A-lister like John McCain. McCain won a Silver Star after suffering torture, permanent physical injuries and more than five years of captivity as a POW in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”
No matter what you think about Trump’s puerile critique of McCain’s combat chops – what was McCain supposed to do, swallow a cyanide pill after his plane was shot down over Hanoi? — Americans have never been much into that Japanese-style “fight to the death” thing. So attempting to undermine the century-old myth of McCain as a war hero is a radical departure.
It’s a radical departure from what Americans are used to seeing and hearing.
Even more interesting – thrilling, even – was to see a preeminent right wing Republican businessperson and politician (yes, Trump is a politician) state unreservedly that the Vietnam War was a disaster.
That Vietnam was wrong had been the MSM narrative from the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
But around the time of the release of “Rambo: First Blood Part II” in 1985, it has been off limits to publicly say what had previously been conventional wisdom: The United States had no business fighting that war.
Trump said:
I was not a big fan of the Vietnam War … I wasn’t a protester, but the Vietnam War was a disaster for our country. What did we get out of the Vietnam War other than death? We got nothing.”
In public life, truer words have rarely been spoken.
In the context of Trump’s attack on McCain, the broader critique of the Vietnam War brings up an important question. And it’s one that Americans rarely discuss.
Is it possible to be a war hero if history judges that the war in which you fought was unjust?
The same question came up briefly in the ongoing Confederate flag controversy following the mass shooting in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Sam Peckinpah’s 1977 film “Cross of Iron,” which showcases personal bravery among Nazi troops fighting on the Eastern front during World War II, says the answer is yes.
Personally, I’d argue that the answer is maybe.
But if you enlisted voluntarily and willingly, like McCain? No.
Millions of other Americans, recognizing that the Vietnam War was immoral and illegal,refused to go even when they were drafted.
McCain should have done the same.
Trump got out of military service due to “bone spurs” in his foot.
And good for him, I say.
If there’s anything to impugn about McCain’s service from a nationalistic viewpoint, it’s the fact that he ultimately caved in to his North Vietnamese torturers by signing a confession that he had committed war crimes.
Having never been in the position of being tortured — and being tortured with no hope of imminent release or even imminent death — I can’t say what I would have done in the same position.
You’d like to think that you would spit in the faces of your captors and tell them to go to . But really, there’s no telling.
As he is wont to do, however, Trump just got silly when he claimed to be a veterans’ advocate.
“I’m with the veterans all the time,” he said.
Cue eye rolling.
Yet Trump scored back points when he went after McCain on one of America’s great shames, its long-standing failure to take proper care of those who serve in its wars. Trump said:
John McCain talks a lot, but he doesn’t do anything. I don’t like the job that John McCain is doing in the Senate because he’s not taking care of our veterans. Some of these people wait four or five days just to see a doctor. They sit in a reception room, which is dirty and filthy and disgusting.”
This is all true.
It is fascinating to watch how Trump has managed to attack militarism from the right.
In his USA Today opinion piece explaining his comments about McCain and Vietnam, Trump wrote:
John McCain the politician has made America less safe and sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures.”
Who could have imagined, even a week ago, that a right wing, Silver Star-winning media darling like McCain could successfully be attacked for his repeated votes in favor of war? Not to mention his belligerence against other countries, like Iran?
This morning on the Today show, Trump told host Matt Lauer that he never said John McCain wasn’t a hero. Trump reaffirmed comments he’d made saying that McCain really owed veterans an apology.
“I’m not a fan of John McCain,” the Republican presidential contender told Lauer in a phone interview. “He’s done a horrible job for the vets.”
Trump may be inconsistent, bombastic, egotistical, and evasive on the issue of his personal wealth, but he is bringing up important issues and a refreshing point of view which has been suppressed far too long.
That’s good for all of us.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...am-john-mccain
I can't believe I'm actually agreeing with a Boutons spam article. I'd also add that McCain - despite knowing the horrors of war intimately - is so much of a chickenhawk that he made up a "funny" jingle about bombing an entire country. He always gets a free pass for his bull by playing the "war hero" card.
Speaking of Iran, what is Trump's policy regarding Iran?
I am so sick f his war hero card and him every other weekend on tv during a dbacks game
a psychiatric evaluation of McCain underwent while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The psych0logical portrait drawn by Spanish psychiatrist Fernando Barral is that of a deeply narcissistic personality, cold, hardened and largely devoid of human empathy, a man who seemed to view the bombing of civilian populations as a kind of sport. These aggressive personality traits have also characterized his nasty political career.–
The top war-monger in Congress has been Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona, seeker of the Republican presidential nomination. In one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain has bellowed for “lights out in Belgrade” and for NATO to “cream” the Serbs. At the start of May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces to use “any means necessary” to destroy Serbia.
McCain is often called a “war hero”, a le adorning an unlovely resume starting with a father who was an admiral and graduation fifth from the bottom at the US Naval Academy, where he earned the nickname “McNasty”. McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam, each averaging about half an hour, total time ten hours and thirty minutes. For these brief excursions the admiral’s son was awared two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts. US Veteran Dispatch calculates our hero earned a medal an hour, which is pretty good going. McCain was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967 and parachuted into Truc Boch Lake, whence he was hauled by Vietnamese, and put in prison.
A couple of years later he was interviewed in prison camp by Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist living in Cuba. The interview appeared in Granma on January 24, 1970.
Barral’s evaluation of McCain is quoted by Amy Silverman, author of many excellent pieces on McCain in the Phoenix-based New Timesweekly. Here’s how Barral described “the personality of the prisoner who is responsible for many criminal bombings of the people.” Barral goes on, “He (McCain) showed himself to be intellectually alert during the interview. From a morale point of view he is not in traumatic shock. He was able to be sarcastic, and even humorous, indicative of psychic equilibrium. From the moral and ideological point of view he showed us he is an insensitive individual without human depth,who does not show the slightest concern, who does not appear to have thought about the criminal acts he committed against a population from the absolute impunity of his airplane, and that nevertheless those people saved his life, fed him, and looked after his health and he is now healthy and strong. I believe that he has bombed densely populated places for sport. I noted that he was hardened, that he spoke of banal things as if he were at a tail party.”
McCain is deeply loved by the press. As Silverman puts it, “As long as he’s the noble outsider, McCain can get away with anything it seems – the Keating Five, a drug stealing wife, nasy jokes about Chelsea Clinton – and the pundits will gurgle and coo.”
Indeed they will. William Safire, Maureen Dowd, Russell Baker, theNew Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, have all slobbered over McCain in empurpled prose. The culmination was a love poem from Mike Wallace in 60 Minutes, who managed to avoid any inconvenient mention of McCain’s close relationship with S & L fraudster Charles Keating, with whom the senator and his kids romped on Bahamian beaches. McCain was similarly spared scrutiny for his astonishing claim that he knew nothing of his wife’s scandalous dealings. His vicious temper has escaped rebuke.
McCain’s escape from the Keating debacle was nothing short of miraculous, probably the activity for which he most deserves a medal.A
fter all, he took more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from the swindler Keating between 1982 and 1988, while simultaneously log-rolling for Keating on Cap ol Hill. In the same period McCain took nine trips to Keating’s place in the Bahamas. When the muck began to rise, McCain threw Keating over the side, hastily reimbursed him for the trips and suddenly developed a profound interest in campaign finance reform.
The pundits love McCain because of his grandstanding on soft money’s baneful role in politics, thus garnering for himself a reputation for willingness to court the enmity of his colleagues.
In fact colleagues in the Senate regard McCain as a mere grandstander. They know that he already has a big war chest left over from his last senatorial campaign, plus torrents of pac money from the corporations that crave his indulgence, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Communications companies (US West, Bell South, ATT, Bell Atlantic), have been particularly effusive in McCain’s treasury, as have banks, military contractors and UPS. They also know he has a rich wife and the certain knowledge that his supposed hopes for an ending to soft money spending will never receive any practical legislative application.
McCain is the kind of Republican that liberals love: solid military credentials as a former POW, ever ready with acceptable sound-bites on campaign finance reform and other cherished issues. Thus it was that McCain drew enthusiastic plaudits last year when he rose in the Senate chamber to denounce theinsertion of $200 million worth of pork in the military construction portion of the defense authorisation bill. Eloquently, he spoke of the 11,200 service families on food stamps, the lack of modern weapons supplied to the military, the declining levels of readiness in the armed forces. Bravely, he laid the blame at the doors of his colleagues: “I could find only one commonality to these projects, and that is that 90 percent of them happened to be in the state or districts of members of the Appropriations Committees.” Sternly, in tones befitting a Cato or a Cicero, the senator urged his colleagues to ponder their sacred duty to uphold the defense of the Republic rather than frittering away the public purse on such frivolous expenditure: “We live in avery dangerous world. We will have some serious foreign policy crises. I am not sure we have the military that is capable of meeting some of these foreseeable threats, but I know that what we are doing with this $200 million will not do a single thing to improve our ability to meet that threat.”
In the gallery, partisans of pork-free spending silently cheered while those who hoped to profit from portions of the $200 million gnashed their teeth in chagrin. Yet, such emotions were misplaced on either side. This was vintage McCain. Had he wished to follow words with deeds, he could have called for a roll-call on the items he had just denounced so fervently. That way the looters and gougers would have had to place their infamy on the record. But, no, McCain simply sat down and allowed the offending expenditure to be authorised in the anonymous babble of a voice vote (“All those in favor say Aye”). Had McCain really had the courage of his alleged convictions he could have filibustered the entire $250 billion authorisation bill, but, inevitably, no such bravery was in evidence. Instead, when the $250 billion finally came to a vote, he ^voted for it.
This miserable display provides useful insights into the reason for McCain’s ineffectiveness on issues such as campaign finance that have garnered him so much favorable publcity. A conservative Senate staffer offers these observations on McCain’s fundamental weakness of character: “The real question is why this Senator did not use the strong leverage he has to insist that his ‘ethical’ position be incorporated into a major bill? After all, Senator McCain couched his concerns in issues of the highest national importance: readiness, modernization, and the military’s ability to defeat the threats we face (whatever they are). “Pragmatism is the most commonly heard excuse. If McCain had made a pain out of himself in insisting on keeping the unneeded and wasteful pork out of the Milcon Authorization bill, some people would argue he would have lost comity with his Senate colleagues. They wouldn’t respect him anymore; they would have been angry with him, because he kept them up late (it was about 10:30 pm), and they would have been embarrassed by his showing them up as pork-meisters. This would weaken his ability to get things done.
“This argument assumes politics in the US Senate is a popularity contest: if you want to get anything done around here, you have to go along and get along. Well, this place is a popularity contest, but it is supposed to be one with the voters, not one’s colleagues. Besides, this place doesn’t really operate that way. Here, they have contempt for fluffy show pieces. Show them you mean business, and you’re someone who has to be dealt with (rather than a talk-only type), and you’ll begin to get some results. Get ready for a fight, though, because they are some on the other side who are no push-overs.
Obviously, Mr. McCain was not prepared to make that investment.”
This article appeared in the May 1999 edition of CounterPunch magazine.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/20/the-horrors-of-john-mccain-war-hero-or-war-criminal/
What The Media Doesn't Get About Donald Trump
https://www.yahoo.com/tv/donald-trum...576220850.html
Trump heads to border amid 3rd party threat
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/23/politi...xas/index.html
Trump heads to border amid 3rd party threat
Donald Trump isn't a real candidate. He's a plant sent to say stupid and take all the heat off of other candidates. Then they get to look sane and competent in comparison, when really they're a bunch of snakes.
Border Patrol union pulls out of Trump meeting
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015...trump-meeting/
He said the border with Mexico is "not secure," and an "honest discussion" is needed with the American people. But he expressed concern that a meeting with Trump would have been portrayed as an endorsement.
"As Local 2455, our intentions to meet with Mr. Trump was to provide a 'Boots on the Ground' perspective to not only Mr. Trump, but to the media that would be in attendance at this event," he said. "Just to be clear, an endorsement was never discussed for any presidential candidate. Local 2455 does not endorse candidates for any political office. For these reasons, Local 2455 will not participate in any events with Mr. Trump."
In a written statement responding to the development, the Trump campaign said the local union was "totally silenced directly from superiors in Washington who do not want people to know how bad it is on the border --- every bit as bad as Mr. Trump has been saying."
A Repug mucky muck for Laredo on NPR this morning spinning Trump's visit that (95% Latino) Laredo appreciates someone who speaks the truth (of his racism, xenophobia, nativism, hate for Mexicans).
tinfoiler
Donald Trump Visits Border in Laredo, ‘Despite the Great Danger’
From the moment he landed, wearing a white “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, Donald J. Trump’s visit to the border of Mexico and the United States seemed to know only one speed: full throttle.
Dozens of police officers on motorcycles blocked traffic and escorted the Trump campaign entourage, which included two chartered buses of reporters that swept through the streets of downtown Laredo.
One bus driver was told nothing in terms of a final destination except “be sure to follow the vehicle in front of you.”
The winding ensemble hit the road minutes after Mr. Trump landed in his plane. He held a brief news conference in the lobby of the airport here, where he repeatedly referred to the personal danger he faced at the border, but affirmed that “I have to do it, I love this country.”
(Laredo, for what it’s worth, is one of the safest cities in the state.)
In just three minutes, he managed to disparage Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, saying he “did a terrible job as governor of Texas,” and then his own security detail, albeit perhaps unintentionally, telling reporters that “we’ll see you at the border,” before adding, with emphasis, “hopefully.”
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/firs...s&emc=rss&_r=0
Nope just seeing right through the bull unlike your dumbass self.
I watched his presser at lunch and it was hilarious.Donald Trump Visits Border in Laredo, ‘Despite the Great Danger’
From the moment he landed, wearing a white “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, Donald J. Trump’s visit to the border of Mexico and the United States seemed to know only one speed: full throttle.
Dozens of police officers on motorcycles blocked traffic and escorted the Trump campaign entourage, which included two chartered buses of reporters that swept through the streets of downtown Laredo.
One bus driver was told nothing in terms of a final destination except “be sure to follow the vehicle in front of you.”
The winding ensemble hit the road minutes after Mr. Trump landed in his plane. He held a brief news conference in the lobby of the airport here, where he repeatedly referred to the personal danger he faced at the border, but affirmed that “I have to do it, I love this country.”
(Laredo, for what it’s worth, is one of the safest cities in the state.)
In just three minutes, he managed to disparage Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, saying he “did a terrible job as governor of Texas,” and then his own security detail, albeit perhaps unintentionally, telling reporters that “we’ll see you at the border,” before adding, with emphasis, “hopefully.”
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/firs...s&emc=rss&_r=0
You know the left is scared when huffpo pulls like this
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/55a8f...0896514d0fd66?
Eh, the WSJ agrees.
Not surprising, Trump on the entire media today in Laredo.
Trump isn't a real candidate but he's not a plant either. He's in this for the attention and self-promotion. How many times has he pulled this "I'm running for President" stunt now? He never truly takes it seriously. It's all about talking himself up saying how successful he is, how rich he is, look at the big crowds coming to hear me talk blah blah blah. I honestly think he's a guy that has all this money, is bored out of his in mind, craves more attention than a Kardashian and this is the only way he can fill those needs.
IMO, shillary or bill are ponying up the campaign...
This was three days ago.
Is that what you think?
Four actually.
Glenn Spencer: Union Fears Trump Could Stop Illegals From Entering US
http://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/658837
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