John McCain will die soon

54 thoughts on “John McCain will die soon”

1. When the time comes, I’m sure our President will be gracious with his comments. /s

   1. I can’t wait to see the difference between the 44 and 45 eulogies.

      1. Rumor is Bush and Obama are invited to his funeral, but the current officeholder isn’t.

2. I actually think he would have made a decent president but he missed out to W. It was such a faux pas to run him with Sarah “I can see Russia from my backyard” Palin. Good grief.

   1. I also didn’t like that he changed his position on equality for gays and lesbians to pander to the evanjaculars. I’m sure he later regretted this.

   2. John McCain lost the Republican primary to “W” in 2000 by a 2:1 margin. This was while Sarah Palin was still Mayor of Wasilla and relatively unknown.

      He won the Republican nomination in 2008 and chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, then lost the election to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

      1. Yes I am aware.

3. McCain is/was one of the Good Republicans, at least most of the time. However, he did make a strange choice of running partner in Sarah Palin, perhaps the main cause he lost the election due to its reflection on his decision-making. He will be missed!

   Let’s hope Ducey replaces him with one of the Bad Republicans that they seem to have lots of down in AZ. This will make it easier to replace them in the next election.

4. McCain has had a remarkable life and certainly had an impact on our nation. I hope he passes as peacefully as possible.

   1. Yes. He is a good and honourable man, and the country needs more of his ilk in politics.

      I hope he suffers as little as possible. I’m glad when he dies he will be with people he loves, who love him. And,as you say, he deserves to as die peacefully as possible.

5. Been a long, strange trip for the senior senator from Arizona. McCain was way too conservative for me ever to have seriously considered voting for (although he’s a RINO by the standards of today’s white-nationalist Republican Party). But I admired the man his pluck, his honesty, and his good humor on board the “Straight Talk Express” during his first run for the presidency, and rooted for him during the 2000 primaries against Dubya. (There’s a great piece of journalism about him in those days by David Foster Wallace here.)

   McCain lost a lot in my eye by letting his ambition get ahead of him during his 2008 run. And we have him to blame for “Sarah Palin” being a name recognized anywhere outside Wasilla, Alaska. But he reemerged in later years as a true statesman, perhaps the only one left in all GOPdom. Would that there would be a few dozen more just like him right now!

   And the man had an unmatched flair for the beau geste. His ultimate, of course, was his refusal to accept release from the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison in North Vietnam until his fellow POWs were released along with him. But there was also his out-of-his-sick-bed thumbs-down on last year’s Obamacare “skinny repeal” bill. And who can forget this (just imagine what Donald Trump would do under the same circumstance):

   1. When prominent politicians die there is a tendency to get very sentimental about them. Such is the case with McCain. In the days and weeks ahead we can expect effusive adoration for his heroism at the Hanoi Hilton and the occasional, although rare, times that he bucked his party. With the passage of time, the ability to objectively evaluate his political career will become easier. Even today, most close observers of the political scene know that he was a conventional conservative Republican. His rhetoric was more “maverick” than his votes, similar to the style of his fellow Arizonian, Jeff Flake. He should be credited for his vote to save Obamacare and he did not across as a troglodyte, but in terms of politics, he was no hero for me. He was just a little less bad Republican.

      1. Oh, I’m not disagreeing with you. But there isn’t a one of the 50 other Republicans in the US senate right now I’d be willing to trade heads-up for him. He, at least, was capable of acting according to conscience.

         That’s a quality in short supply these days.

         1. He’s also a remnant of a time when members of both parties were able to work together and compromise. He & Biden are apparently great friends.

            1. Yeah, I understand McCain was a real comfort to Biden et famille during the death of Biden’s son Bo — and that Biden is returning that kindness in kind to the McCain family now.

      2. One of the(many, many) points at which I thought Trump’s support would turn against him was when he, a draft-dodging rich kid who plays with other people’s money, casually insulted the record of one of the most remarkable military heroes in modern American history.

         It seemed like a perfect confluence of conservative sore points: insulting the military, insulting a fellow party member, himself a former Republican candidate for the presidency, and all of it coming from a draft dodging twerp. ‘Surely…surely…’ I thought, as I did every time the man descended another rung on the ladder of tawdriness; but none of his supporters batted an eyelid. All it did was turn them against McCain, the nadir(so far) coming when a Trump team member(?) said ‘he’ll be dead soon’, so what does it matter what McCain thinks about anything?

         There are so many to choose from, but Trump’s attack on McCain, and the total lack of pushback he got from his supporters, is a perfectly representative example of how ethically unmoored the American right has become. In terms of symbolism it’s hard to beat. The lowest of the low, a spineless, shirking coward, dragging a conservative war hero through the mud, and being applauded for it.

         1. The Republican Party could’ve snuffed Trump’s candidacy in its cradle right then. They didn’t because they thought they could put the white-nationalist energy Trump brought with him from the “Birther” movement to their own purposes.

            That decision may be the demise of the GOP yet.

            1. “That decision may be the demise of the GOP yet.”

               How long have we been saying that, now…?

            2. But for 77,000 votes that went Donald Trump’s way in three states, I think the GOP would’ve had its reckoning in November 2016 after Trump’s loss (which was the GOP’s sixth loss of the popular vote out of the last seven presidential elections).

               Now, I think once it becomes clear beyond peradventure that Trump has been involved in seriously unlawful conduct, the blood-letting will begin between the Trump deadend diehards (the 25% of the US public that “strongly approves” of Trump in polls, which corresponds to about 60% of the Republican Party faithful) and the Republicans who don’t want to follow Trump into the abyss (whom the others will classify as RINOs). That conflict could well tear the Republican Party apart for good.

            3. I hope you’re right. But I’m one of those who thinks that if that still hasn’t happened it ain’t never gonna. And don’t forget that Putin’s machinations are as aggressive as ever. Or that these are the guys who have all the moola.

6. John McCain is a navy man through and through. It was in the genes, as they say. He had to go through more than most during his service career with several years in the Hanoi Hilton. His politics was moderate by today’s standards and the Trump party disgusted him. As said by others, he will be remembered as a good man.

7. I wish he had come out more strongly against the Republican party earlier. He was too conservative for me to have voted for him, though I wish more Republicans had his degree of integrity. He voted for tax cuts on the rich which I strongly disagree with him on.

8. I lost a good friend, and a wonderful, driven man he was, to glioblastoma. Difference was he was only 40. Cancer is a bitch.
   I never really appreciated him, but he was never in the category of traitors, or traitor accomplices, that the GOP has become now. His opposition to the usurper in the WH should be commended.

   1. That latter bit was about Mr McCain, of course.

   2. Yes, and brain cancer seems to feature more prominently these days. A person I work with lost his teenaged son to brain cancer recently. Many cancers also metastasize to the brain. I lost a good friend to brain mets a few months ago after her rare cancer (in a sweat gland of the arm) spread 3 years after initial treatment.

9. Aside from his strong stance against torture, I have never been a big fan of McCain. He never met a war that he did not want to expand. He stunk of corruption in the Keating Five scandal. He was anti-vaccine and very superstitious (lucky penny, feather, shoe, etc.)

   I prefer him to most of today’s politicians but he was not half as pure as he is commonly portrayed.

   1. Now, now Curtis you mustn’t peek behind the curtain. What next? The fact that his prison guards named him “the songbird” because he was so co-operative even making videos with them, or that his injuries were a result of baling out of his sticken airplane not torture, or his many violations of the Logan act including several meetings with Al Quaeda representatives (yes there are photographs)…These things and more (warmongering for instance) are only brought up by those who hate good and true patriots. Don’t fall into the trap.

      1. “… his prison guards named him ‘the songbird’ because he was so co-operative …”

         Have a reliable source for that? Spent a lot of time in a POW camp yourself, have you?

         McCain did five and a half years as a prisoner of war, most of it in excruciating pain and much of it hovering at little more 100 pounds body weight — and nearly all of that after refusing early release because his daddy was an admiral.

         Anyone who would disparage that kind of service with unsubstantiated slurs is lower than snake dick in my book.

         1. “lower than snake dick”

            I’ve never heard this. It’s brilliant! You didn’t come up with that, did you?

            1. I think it (or something like it) qualifies as an old rusticism.

         2. OK Kukec; start here:

            https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/10/31/giving-aid-and-comfort-to-the-enemy/

            Plenty more where that came from. Google can help. Oh and reacquaint yourself with ‘da rulz”.

            1. OK, moffat, that claim has been repeatedly debunked, including here. It’s also been refuted by McCain’s fellow POWs, who certainly should know. See here. Your bogus claim stems back to the vicious dirty-tricks campaign conducted on behalf of George W. Bush against McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary — the same dirty-tricks campaign that spread pictures of McCain with his adopted Bangladeshi daughter claiming she was an illegitimate half-black child he had fathered.

               Why do you spread such easily falsified slurs against an American patriot? At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?

            2. This is just as bad as the people who claimed Obama was a secret Muslim.

            3. Michelle wears an invisible burka!

            4. Those darn secret Muslims! Why can’t they use their invisibility technology for good?

10. I didn’t love much of his politics, but I always admired McCain. He was a good man with a good heart who fought for this country, a country he believed in and wanted to do right by. He was the rare politician who genuinely cared about making his nation and its people better, even if that didn’t always result in what I would consider the proper policy conclusions.

    1. The man had integrity, and I’ll miss that most of all, as will the Senate.

       1. Agreed.

    2. I’ll say this for John McCain: had he been elected, I’m reasonably sure he’d’ve been the best Republican president of my lifetime (and my lifetime stretches back to Eisenhower).

       Now, that may be damning with faint praise coming from me; I doubt there’d’ve been much I agreed with a President McCain about on domestic policy. And, in terms of foreign affairs, he tended to see the US military as a hammer and the rest of the world as a nail. But the man had character, and character counts. I’d have trusted him to be square with the American people, and to have done his level best in a time of crisis.

       1. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

          Which is usually the case with stuff you say.

       2. You preferred “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to “Read my lips, no more taxes?”

          😉

11. Could the family of Senator McCain discourage the President from attending the funeral? Trump made disparaging and demeaning remarks about McCain’s time as a prisoner of war.

    1. Trump likes Republicans who don’t die, ok?

    2. After the blistering broadside of a statement McCain issued against Trump a few weeks ago, I doubt Trump will show up; in fact, he’ll likely Tweet his wonderment at the very idea that anyone would treat McCain with even a modicum of dignity.

       1. Mark my words: he’ll send his “thoughts & prayers” (and probably his simpering vice president). That should serve as a great comfort to the McCain family.

          1. I, too, doubt Trump will turn up. Perhaps due to a recurrent bone-spur.

    3. Hasn’t McCain famously stated in no uncertain terms that he does NOT want Trump at his funeral?

       1. I would be glad if that’s the case. One thing I always loved about McCain was that he never intimated or expressed hatred toward political opponents, as he rightly saw that most people who disagreed with him on policy questions were likely coming from a good place themselves. When McCain expressed hatred for someone, he did so because he thought them to be self-interested jackoffs without integrity.

          In this context, his hatred of Trump makes complete sense and is a lovely final fuck you to someone who very much deserves it.

12. Going to funeral service tomorrow for member of my family who was diagnosed in May w/ Stage IV inoperable glioblastoma. She died last week. She was 50 years old. Death does not discriminate.

13. John McCain was a “good man”? He was one of the worst war-mongers in Congress. If it had been up to him, we’d be at war with Iran and North Korea, in addition to the still continuing Mideast wars he enthusiastically helped start.

    As for being a war hero, he dropped bombs until he got shot down and then was tortured in prison. That makes him a wounded veteran, but not a hero.

    1. Because the North Vietnamese discovered he was an admiral’s son, John McCain was offered an early release in 1968. He refused and insisted that all the POWs be released in the order in which they were captured. As a result, he spent five more years in hellish captivity.

       Anybody doesn’t think that makes him a hero can kiss my ass. (And that comes from someone who was 100% opposed to the war at the time.)

       1. +1

14. Just got got a bbc breaking news announcement that he has died. 🙁

15. McCain has just died. Farewell to a hero and a statesman. A fine human being, indeed.

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