I can’t say I have agreed with McCain on everything. Maybe it is to the point that McCain is not, politically, on my personal “side”. But it is hard to see how to portray him as anything but on America’s “side”, considering his career and accomplishments. We should all salute that, to encourage more of it.
So I say John McCain is all right. This is the dope, and everyone has my permission to go snarkily into the details of what John did wrong. I’m just sayin’, his plus column is gonna win.
John McCain foisted Miss ‘I can see Russia from my house!’, Sara Palan upon the world.
And, in doing so, opened the door to ‘apparently now anyone can be considered qualified’ just by being ‘out there’ and garnering attention.
He sometimes seems a decent man doing the right thing. But not always. And without consistency it ain’t enough, I’m afraid.
So I’m giving him two strikes.
I have nothing but contempt for Sarah Palin, but if you’re going to disparage her with a quote, best to do so with something she actually said rather than something from an SNL skit making fun of her.
McCain is a flawed human being with plusses and minuses. Some of his flaws were gigantic (Iraq War supporter), and some of his pluses were also gigantic (having gone through what he did as a POW). I’d prefer to judge the individual things he did.
Certainly no one is perfect, and even he regrets foisting Sarah Palin on the country, but in the grand scheme of things, I think John McCain tried to do what he thought was best. I do believe he is, at his core, a decent person.
I’m sorry he’s dealing with all the media abuse on top of his health issues.
Meh. He showed amazing courage and integrity as a POW, and nobody can take that away from him. I also remember that he didn’t allow that idiot woman to get away with calling Obama an Arab. Other than that, he seems to be just like Rand Paul, jumping in front of a camera to say what a maverick he is, only to vote the party line almost every time.
And his persecution of Susan Rice for simply doing her job was unconscionable. That alone makes me glad to see him go.
Great patriot as a soldier/POW. Mediocre politician who has marketed the “maverick” label far more than he has lived it and allowed numerous harmful things to happen just because they were from his side of the aisle. To his credit, he was (maybe still is) one of the very few people in Congress who would take a meeting regarding Native American affairs when my wife worked on the Hill in that capacity.
I see McCain as a decent human being who probably would have made a pretty good President.
I also had trouble accepting his accomodation with nimrods for perceived political gain, as in the Palin choice (had the same feeling when Bob Dole was running for President and he endorsed Oliver North for the Senate).
Good I-told-you-so op-ed by McCain the Wall St. Journal today re Putin and the Russians.
When he was running against Obama, I was vehemently opposed to him. But considering what we have now, I’d give anything to have McCain in the White House. At least he has a conscience, and we see what a president without a conscience looks like.
To me, McCain will always be the guy who let Obama win the White House because he was too afraid to take him on.
So, another one for the Plus column, then?
Add that to the plus column
He endorsed Trump when it mattered most in order to win his primary. That’s a karmic deficit that makes it pretty hard to balance the books.
That’s true, but I think there is a bit more nuance to it than that. McCain said early on that he was committed to supporting whoever the GOP nominee was. I can understand if you think that’s a distinction without a difference, but I don’t see it as necessarily a bad thing to have some party loyalty unless you think that loyalty would result in actual harm coming to the country. Of course one can readily argue that a Trump presidency should give any thinking person pause, so there’s that, too.
He did withdraw his endorsement later in the campaign, but one could argue that by then his own Senate race was pretty safe.
Well yeah, that’s kinda what happened…
I can’t respect the “party loyalty above all else” line of thinking when applied so rigidly. If your party has a candidate that’s as blatantly awful as Trump, you have a moral obligation to not support them when you know what damage they will wreak should they actually win the election and have access to powers they shouldn’t get within sniffing distance of. You should also have enough sense to know that pushing such a person to the forefront will permanently damage your party’s brand.
Also, you must really lack dignity to support someone who so casually mocked your experiences as a POW.
I was unable to take McCain serious in the 2008 campaign, but that was 100% Palin’s fault. McCain could have made a good, trustworthy president. But that Palin thing made that impossible.
McCain just proved his love of country by asking trump to stay away from his funeral.
Fair winds and following seas, Mr. McCain.
Every time I start to warm towards Mr. McCain, I recall some of his more outrageous comments and behaviors. I remember him carrying water for Reagan on many occasions. This did NOT endear him to me. Nor did his vote against the DREAM act.
Yet the man was demonstrably principled and brave, despite that.
So: He is a better person than most politicians.
He also called his wife a trollop and a cunt in public, which certainly takes his decency down a notch. His “suspensions” of his campaigns to take care of supposed emergency issues in Washington were ridiculously transparent, and I can never forgive his inflicting us all with Caribou Barbie.
Have McCain as my senator makes me a bit biased towards him.
I think that he a mostly decent guy, who unfortunately puts his party ahead of the country on too many occasions.
I would have voted for him in 2008, until he chose Palin as his running mate.
I think he could have been truly great, but he “grew a pair” too late in his career.
He still voted to send a trillion dollars to the most entitled people on earth. And sicced Palin on us. Yes, he was courageous as a POW, but that doesn’t balance the damage he did.
He has virtues and achievements and he has flaws and failures. Like many, he has many times failed to live up to his standard, and others has held to it even when nobody would have faulted him for backing down. It is damning by faint praise to say that compared to what we have got now in the presidency and in congressional leadership he looms large. Yes, he does stand above them but, Jesus, look at the baseline of evil *and *ineptitude we’re comparing him to.