{"id":79458,"date":"2017-07-31T16:55:09","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T20:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=79458"},"modified":"2017-07-31T16:55:09","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T20:55:09","slug":"no-john-mccain-is-not-a-hero-hes-a-traitor-to-the-american-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=79458","title":{"rendered":"“No!” John McCain is not a hero; he’s a traitor to the American Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

John McCain: \u201cAmerican Hero\u201d<\/h1>\n

Journalists and politicians venerating John McCain’s civility and decency have a short memory.<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nBRANKO MARCETIC<\/p>\n

Nothing rehabilitates a politician\u2019s tarnished image quite like death. It happened to\u00a0Nixon<\/a>. It happened to\u00a0Reagan<\/a>. It will probably happen to Bush. And right now, it\u2019s happening to John McCain.<\/p>\n

McCain is still alive, but a week ago he was diagnosed with a\u00a0particularly aggressive form<\/a>\u00a0of brain cancer, requiring surgery to have a tumor removed. The news prompted an\u00a0outpouring<\/a>\u00a0of grief and well-wishing from Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives alike, as well as a\u00a0deluge<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0hagiographical<\/a>\u00a0pieces<\/a>valorizing<\/a>\u00a0McCain<\/a>\u00a0as an American\u00a0hero<\/a>\u00a0and all-around man of honor.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis 2008 campaign against Barack Obama now looks like the very model of civility in the wake of Trump,\u201d one\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0columnist\u00a0recently wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0editorial board\u00a0declared its wish<\/a>\u00a0\u201cfor Washington and the world beyond to pause for a moment to absorb the example that Mr. McCain sets every day,\u201d when in a time \u201cwhere politicians will say just about anything at all, true or untrue, to gain an advantage,\u201d McCain has stuck to his convictions and stayed in politics, not to win, but \u201cto improve our world.\u201d Pause for a moment to wipe the tears from your eyes.<\/p>\n

Democrats gave him a\u00a0standing ovation<\/a>\u00a0and even\u00a0embraced him<\/a>\u00a0as he returned to the Senate. Meanwhile,\u00a0liberal journalists<\/a>\u00a0sternly\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0anyone within earshot to keep any McCain criticisms to themselves in this trying time.<\/p>\n

This adulation has only intensified since last night, when McCain cast the deciding vote to kill the Obamacare repeal effort for at least the foreseeable future. The vote was dramatic, unexpected, and, for anyone who doesn\u2019t want to see millions of people lose their healthcare, laudatory. The road to McCain\u2019s \u201cmaverick moment<\/a>\u201d in opposing his own party on Obamacare repeal was long, and mostly filled with McCain positioning himself as an implacable opponent of Donald Trump even as he\u00a0supported virtually everything<\/a>\u00a0the president did. His vote last night was quickly\u00a0labelled<\/a>\u00a0\u201can act of heroism.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that McCain\u2019s vote was crucial to halting the GOP\u2019s incoherent and cruel seven year campaign to gut Obamacare. But let\u2019s not overstate things.<\/p>\n

McCain\u00a0spent<\/a>\u00a0years<\/a>\u00a0attacking<\/a>\u00a0Obamacare,\u00a0depicting<\/a>\u00a0it as a hyper-partisan piece of legislation written in secret and rammed through Congress, a description better suited to the GOP\u2019s 2017-era series of health-care-repeal failures than Obama\u2019s law. It was \u201ca law that I fought against for weeks on end,\u201d he\u00a0bragged<\/a>\u00a0late last year. He likewise spent this time\u00a0calling<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0voting for<\/a>\u00a0the law\u2019s\u00a0repeal and replacement<\/a>with what\u00a0he called<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca free-market approach\u201d to health care.<\/p>\n

His 2016 reelection campaign\u00a0revolved around<\/a>\u00a0aggressively opposing the law, while in in 2015, McCain\u00a0voted for a Republican bill<\/a>\u00a0that, among other things, gutted Obamacare\u2019s Medicaid expansion. (Not to worry, though \u2014 McCain assured reporters that while he would vote for the bill, it would \u201cprovide [him] with discomfort.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Which is not to mention the fact that McCain initially voted\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0the GOP\u2019s most recent attempt at repeal, despite giving a much fawned-over speech denouncing the bill and how it had been put together. Or that McCain\u2019s decision to vote against repeal and its monstrous consequences was the very least an ordinary, decent human being would have done in the same situation, particularly one who hours before had his life potentially saved by a publicly funded health-care plan. Or the fact that his switch came after widespread criticism decrying his hypocrisy. Or that two other Republicans, both women, were early and consistent \u201cno\u201d votes on repeal. And now the\u00a0Washington Post<\/a><\/cite>\u00a0tells us that McCain voted against the bill because he wasn\u2019t sufficiently assured a \u201cbroad House-Senate negotiation for a wider rollback of the law\u201d would follow.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, no matter how calculated and reluctant, McCain\u2019s vote against repeal will add to his mythos and perpetuate the idea of him as an honorable, heroic caretaker of American decency, perpetually rising above the fray of petty partisanship to do what\u2019s best. It will help to further encourage suppression of any legitimate reckoning of his actions and record.<\/p>\n

We should resist such impulses. It\u2019s not just that as a public figure with a great degree of power and influence, McCain and his legacy warrant criticism. But much as with Reagan, this late-life valorization distorts McCain\u2019s actual political record, which is far from the heroic image now being shopped around.<\/p>\n

In the last week, some have\u00a0pointed to<\/a>\u00a0McCain\u2019s manufactured \u201cmaverick\u201d image. Others have\u00a0pointed to<\/a>\u00a0the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent lives that McCain has helped extinguish through his unfluctuating support for any and every war.<\/p>\n

Clearly, his policy record is abominable. But since so much of the veneration of McCain is focused on decorum and civility, I want to focus on another topic: his repugnant 2008 presidential campaign.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
\n

How Dangerous, How Dishonorable<\/h1>\n

In the wake of the news of his brain cancer, one of the most\u00a0frequently shared<\/a>\u00a0pieces of McCain-related media was\u00a0this 2008 video<\/a>\u00a0of McCain defending Obama, his Democratic opponent, against the anger and bigotry of McCain\u2019s own supporters. The video was shared by\u00a0a number of journalists<\/a>\u00a0and others as evidence of McCain\u2019s essential decency, honor, and integrity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll always respect John McCain for this moment,\u201d wrote one. \u201cHe spoke against the idiots and crazies. It was the right thing to do.\u201d \u201cThere was a time when presidential candidates were magnanimous,\u201d wrote another. \u201cThanks Senator McCain.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was \u201ca principled man\u201d who \u201cfought on issues, not on slandering anyone he don\u2019t agree with,\u201d wrote others, adding that \u201ctoday\u2019s GOP should follow his heroic example.\u201d The incident was \u201cone of the most heroic moments of McCain\u2019s career,\u201d\u00a0opined<\/a>\u00a0one columnist.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an implicit critique of Donald Trump in these statements: unlike Trump, who gleefully riles up his most hateful supporters, McCain fought to elevate the public discourse and spoke out against his own voters\u2019 baser instincts.<\/p>\n

The only problem is, none of it is true.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s give McCain the benefit of the doubt and assume that in the incident shown in the 2008 video McCain assumed the woman labeling Obama an \u201cArab\u201d meant it as code for \u201cterrorist,\u201d rather than that he was implying Arabs aren\u2019t decent people. This reflects well on McCain. But this came after a week of intense, desperate, and concerted dog-whistling in which McCain and his surrogates all-but-called Obama a foreign terrorist, riling up a segment of his supporters in a spectacularly Trump-like fashion.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the McCain campaign\u2019s effort to \u201cother\u201d Obama continued well past this point. In fact, McCain\u2019s racist \u201908 campaign probably helped produce Trump\u2019s political career. These details are worth recounting not as a defense of Obama \u2014\u00a0whose\u00a0legacy<\/a>\u00a0on a\u00a0wide range of issues<\/a>\u00a0deserves harsh and continued criticism \u2014 but as a way of understanding just how wrong the current round of McCain veneration is.<\/p>\n

When the general campaign started, McCain, still haunted by memories of the\u00a0notoriously dirty<\/a>\u00a0South Carolina campaign that had derailed his 2000 run, certainly seemed to want to run a campaign that wasn\u2019t incredibly racist. He\u00a0ruled out<\/a>attacking Obama on his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright,\u00a0condemning<\/a>the North Carolina Republican Party for an ad on the subject, and stating that \u201call I can do is, in as visible a way as possible, disassociate myself from that kind of campaigning.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a conservative radio host used Obama\u2019s middle name, Hussein, three times while disparaging him in a speech introducing McCain at a rally, McCain\u00a0held a press conference<\/a>\u00a0reaffirming Obama\u2019s integrity while condemning and apologizing for the remarks, promising \u201cit will never happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

This attitude lasted roughly as long as McCain remained competitive in the polls with Obama, at which point the campaign went on the attack. At first, it stuck to the usual staid lines \u2014 Obama was naive and inexperienced.<\/p>\n

But as the advent of the financial crisis, and his erratic response, sent McCain\u00a0tumbling in the polls<\/a>, the campaign got desperate.<\/p>\n

In early October, the campaign\u00a0rolled out<\/a>\u00a0a strategy to aggressively assail Obama on his character and personal affiliations.<\/p>\n

The next week would see a constant barrage of attacks from McCain and, especially, from his running mate Sarah Palin, who painted Obama as alien, un-American, and suspect.<\/p>\n

The campaign already had some practice in this approach. In April, McCain had\u00a0first raised<\/a>\u00a0the matter of Obama\u2019s acquaintance with Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground and longtime Chicago educator, only a few days after his deputy campaign manager sent out a\u00a0fundraising email<\/a>\u00a0attacking Obama for receiving praise from a Hamas official. (Ironically, an al Qaeda supporter would\u00a0later urge<\/a>\u00a0the group to help McCain win, because his implacable love of war meant it would be easier to succeed in \u201cexhausting America.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But in October, the campaign went into racist overdrive. It could never come right out and give credence to the ludicrous rumors that were being passed around in right-wing circles about Obama: for instance, that he was secretly a Muslim terrorist, or a foreign radical out to overthrow the US government. Instead, by repeatedly linking him to \u201cterrorists\u201d and suggesting he had a tenuous to non-existent connection to America and its values, the campaign merely winked at it. Like any good dog whistle, the trick was letting the listener hear what they believed they already knew.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America,\u201d Sarah Palin\u00a0said at a fundraiser<\/a>. \u201cOur opponent is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he\u2019s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after, when Obama criticized McCain\u2019s health-care plan, calling it \u201cradical,\u201d the campaign\u2019s spokesman put out a statement charging that Obama had no right to use that word \u201con a day when new reports have surfaced about Barack Obama\u2019s long association with a domestic terrorist.\u201d \u201cThe American people know radical when they hear it, and John McCain is not the candidate in this election they should be concerned about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

McCain himself got in on the action, with vaguely racist insinuations about Obama becoming\u00a0part of his stump speech<\/a>. At one point he warned that the campaign had returned \u201c$33,000 in illegal foreign funds from\u00a0Palestinian\u00a0<\/em>donors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, we don\u2019t care about an old, washed-up terrorist,\u201d McCain\u00a0told three thousand people<\/a>\u00a0at a campaign stop in Wisconsin. \u201cWe need to know the full extent of the relationship because of whether Senator Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The campaign then called up a local New York GOP politician, John Murtagh, to put out a statement on Ayers. Murtagh\u2019s family home had been firebombed decades before while his father presided over a trial of Black Panther members, which the Weather Underground had been suspected, though never proved, to be involved in. \u201cBarack Obama\u2019s friend tried to kill my family,\u201d Murtagh charged in the statement, which was distributed by the campaign.<\/p>\n

The campaign sent out flyers plastered with a mugshot of Ayers and the words, \u201cTerrorist. Radical. Friend of Obama.\u201d An introductory speaker at one campaign rally made sure to repeatedly say Obama\u2019s full name, telling the crowd to \u201cthink about how you\u2019ll feel on November 5 if you see the news that Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, is president of the United States.\u201d He\u00a0wasn\u2019t the only<\/a>\u00a0campaign speaker to do so. But unlike McCain\u2019s previous full-throated repudiation of such dog-whistling, the campaign now\u00a0sent out a limp disavowal<\/a>\u00a0of the \u201cinappropriate rhetoric\u201d via email. Hardly the stuff of maverick heroism.<\/p>\n

These insinuations\u00a0carried over<\/a>\u00a0into the\u00a0campaign\u2019s TV spots<\/a>, which featured ominous voiceovers warning viewers over a foreboding soundtrack that Obama could not be trusted (\u201cWho is Barack Obama?\u201d\u00a0one gravely wondered<\/a>), and reminding them of his supposed terrorist connections. \u201cHow dishonorable,\u201d went one spot. \u201cHow dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Variations on these racialized ideas had of course preceded the McCain campaign, floating around in the darker reaches of the Right. The idea that Obama was a secret Muslim-cum-communist bent on overthrowing American democracy was advanced on fringe websites, internet forums, and email chains your uncle sent you. But this was the first time that the GOP candidate had given credence to the rumors by giving the fringe theories what could charitably be described as a sly wink in public.<\/p>\n

The accusations worked to whip McCain\u2019s crowds into a frenzy, with crowd members often\u00a0yell<\/a>ing<\/a>\u00a0things<\/a>\u00a0like \u201cTreason!<\/a>,<\/u>\u201d \u201cTraitor!<\/a>,<\/u>\u201d \u201cTerrorist!\u201d \u201cOff with his head!<\/a>,<\/u>\u201d and \u201cKill him!,\u201d At\u00a0one campaign stop<\/a>, when McCain asked who the real Obama was for the umpteenth time, a woman yelled, \u201cHe is a bomb,\u201d while another man registered his fear that \u201csocialists are taking over the country.\u201d At another rally, the crowd\u00a0turned on the press<\/a>, hurling abuse and obscenities at reporters and a camera crew, with one man yelling at a black sound man\u00a0to \u201csit down, boy.\u201d<\/p>\n

A number of McCain\u2019s former Republican allies registered their disgust with his tactics, with one writing him an open letter warning that if \u201cyour campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as \u2018not one of us,\u2019 I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was the context for the supposedly brave and decent stand McCain took in that infamous video. It wasn\u2019t an act of honor \u2014 McCain was horrified at the runaway train he had set in motion and wanted off.<\/p>\n

Except that\u2019s not quite true, either. Because even after McCain reassured the crowd of people he had spent a week terrifying that they had nothing to fear, the campaign continued to advance the idea that Obama was somehow dangerous.<\/p>\n

Mostly, this was by suggesting that Obama\u2019s staid, centrist vision was actually a form of secret Marxism, an absurd idea whose real meaning was to signal that Obama was alien and un-American.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe hopes that you will not notice how radical his ideas are,\u201d Palin\u00a0told a crowd<\/a>\u00a0a day after the incident in the video. Based on an\u00a0offhand comment<\/a>\u00a0Obama made about how \u201cwhen you spread the wealth around, it\u2019s good for everybody\u201d because businesses have more customers, McCain and Palin both accused Obama of being a\u00a0socialist<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 an accusation that seems bizarre now after the Bernie Sanders campaign, but was potent in 2008, when much of the public had little familiarity with any semblance of social democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,\u201d McCain\u00a0said in a radio address<\/a>. He amusingly accused Obama of being \u201cmore to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.\u201d \u201cNow we know that the slogans \u2018change you can believe in\u2019 and \u2018change we need\u2019 are code words for Barack Obama\u2019s ultimate goal: \u2018redistributive change\u2019,\u201d said McCain\u2019s\u00a0top economics adviser<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Not that McCain and his campaign ceased the earlier accusations. In a conference call with reporters, one of McCain\u2019s national security advisers\u00a0rattled off a list<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cvillains\u201d who supposedly supported Obama, such as Iran\u2019s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas.<\/p>\n

McCain even hired\u00a0one of the same firms<\/a>\u00a0that had organized the robocalls against him in 2000 to run similarly scurrilous robocalls against Obama. One\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cObama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers\u201d and that Democrats were planning \u201can extreme leftist agenda,\u201d while\u00a0another<\/a>\u00a0cautioned that \u201cObama and his fellow Democrats aren\u2019t who you think they are,\u201d and that they wanted to \u201cgive civil rights to terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

On top of this, similar to Trump, McCain began insinuating that the election result was being rigged in Obama\u2019s favor as the campaign reached its final weeks. The campaign\u00a0ran an ad<\/a>\u00a0(opening with the familiar refrain \u201cWho is Barack Obama?\u201d) accusing Obama of having \u201cdeep ties\u201d to the now-defunct community-activist organization ACORN, which the ad charged with \u201cintimidation tactics\u201d and \u201cmassive voter fraud.\u201d (The actual crime had been minor voter\u00a0registration<\/em>\u00a0fraud, which did not affect the elections and simply involved low-level ACORN employees pretending to sign fake people up to vote in order to get paid more. The Right used these minor incidents to declare an eventually successful war on the group.)<\/p>\n

In the final presidential debate, McCain himself\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0that ACORN was \u201cnow on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

The Real John McCain<\/h1>\n

The adoration suddenly being showered on McCain across the political spectrum is as unsurprising as it is unwarranted. The McCain of the 2008 campaign, which is now ironically touted as his finest hour, wasn\u2019t a man of honor \u2014 he was a man who used racism and absurd accusations of terrorist sympathies to try to win an election.<\/p>\n

What makes this current veneration particularly odd is that a significant amount of it is coming from those who view themselves as implacable opponents of Trump. Yet the McCain campaign\u2019s October 2008 rallies, with their\u00a0incitement<\/a>\u00a0of rage, bigotry, and\u00a0open hostility<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0the press<\/a>, were in many ways the forerunners of Trump\u2019s own campaign eight years later.<\/p>\n

Trump no doubt received at least some inspiration for his own public attacks on Obama\u2019s Americanness in 2011 from the McCain campaign\u2019s not-so-sly insinuations three years earlier. He was paying attention, after all \u2014 Trump\u00a0endorsed McCain<\/a>\u00a0in 2008.<\/p>\n

Obama deserved plenty of legitimate criticism in the 2008 campaign \u2014 and several orders of magnitude more during his time in office. But none of those critiques came from John McCain. One doesn\u2019t have to revel in McCain\u2019s illness to believe the current praise he is awash in is a distorted picture of his actual record.<\/p>\n

If one believes Trump\u2019s political career has been a cynical appropriation of far-right tropes for electoral success, as many do, then it makes little sense to treat McCain as a hero when he did the same. Who is the real John McCain? He already told us in October 2008.<\/p>\n

___
\nhttp:\/\/www.jacobinmag.com\/2017\/07\/john-mccain-donald-trump-obama-republican-party-presidential-campaign<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}