McCain was just trying to spare the people attending the shock of his withered body leaping by reflex out of the coffin to kiss the fattest part of Trumps’s ass.
John McCain is a fucking sellout.
I don’t know for sure if his ‘maverick’ phase was genuine, but for several years up to mid-2004, he certainly played the part well enough to convince me. Aside from his hawkishness in foreign policy, his stances on domestic issues were very atypical for a Republican even then, and he routinely made common cause with Democrats on various issues.
Then in June 2004, he apparently decided that if he ever wanted a shot at the Presidency, the best route was to abandon his mavericky ways, endorse Bush, and become a standard-issue Republican. Which is what he’s been ever since, with only very rare deviations.
I will give him this, though: one of the GOP attempts to kill Obamacare last year would have succeeded if he’d voted for it. But he didn’t. So it still exists, despite the best efforts of the GOP to kill it.
This is a little like being the thinnest shit sandwich.
Is “chose a running mate who was blatantly racist, but didn’t allow her to make statements that were both racist AND really stupid in public while campaigning with him” really a point in his favor? Or “he endorsed Trump, but did it for personal gain and not for idealogical support, and stopped his endorsement when it wasn’t helping him anymore?” The kind of stuff people say in support of the Trump-supporting, Pain boosting, standard issue republican who paints himself as a maverick while voting the party line doesn’t exactly endear him to me.
True. On the other hand, think of how much better the ACA would be if McCain had supported it in the first place and brought some Republicans over with him to craft a more rounded bill rather than being an active participant in McConnell’s obstruct & sabotage game. It’s great that he developed a conscious after he got brain cancer (well, not the cancer part of course) but it’s a damn shame it came so late and under those circumstances.
McCain was one of the few Republicans to try to be bipartisan on occasion. Remember McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform? He took decades of heat for that from his party.
Yet it seems he treated his first wife horribly.
As I said, better than the average politician. Yet that’s not a high bar to achieve. Unless you’re a politician, maybe. He got my grudging respect, but not my vote. Not that he cared.
No, he wouldn’t have. No Republican since Eisenhower did, so it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that they have been categorically unable to do so.
ETA: He’s still alive, right? Is this thread just a death watch while we rush to take our last opportunities to say bad things about him?
I lost track of how many times McCain would say the right thing and then vote the wrong way anyway.
Also, after the 2000 primaries where Bush played very dirty against McCain (with some egregious push-polling) and won the primary and then McCain completely rolled over and played besties ever after killed the notion of him being a “maverick”.
Actions speak louder than words and McCain’s actions in congress were wrong so many times, toeing the party line no matter what.
Quite true. Which is why my top line is still that he was a fucking sellout.
Hoo boy, yeah. He did it so often it was a joke in many quarters. Never did figure out why the MSM never seemed to catch on.
Yeah, back when he still could reasonably be called a maverick. I’m not going to credit him today for everything he turned his back on nearly a decade and a half ago.
As everyone above has laid out, a decidedly mixed bag with a lot of bad baggage.
And yet he still doesn’t deserve the crap he’s taking from deplorable slime molds.
I think John McCain knows the depth of the shitty abyss living in the WH better than anyone else in the Senate. So it makes sense for him to publicly furrow his brow more intensely than his Republican colleagues. John knows the shit is about to hit the fan, so the brow-furrowing is his way of ensuring the splatter won’t stick to him and his legacy too much. However, 99% of his votes are in lockstep with the party. He may express “concern” about the president leading the party. But that concern hasn’t compelled McCain to leave the party. He could do it now if he wanted to, but he won’t.
He is “all right” compared to the majority of GOP politicians. But Martin Luther McCain, he is not.
The SNL scripts were *more *coherent than what she actually said.
As for McCain, I’d believe his “Country First” stuff more if he hadn’t so often been “Republican Party First and Only”. We can honor him without telling falsehoods.
No, I agree that nothing he can or will do is enough to make up for choosing Palin, but I wasn’t talking about her. I was talking about this:
Unlike most Republican politicians who would have at best thanked her without further comment, and more typically would have agreed with her, he actually corrected her bullshit.That’s what is so frustrating about McCain. Unlike someone such as Ted Cruz (as one example) who you are pretty sure has no self awareness when it comes to the evil he does McCain showed he had that self awareness. You could see him realize the utter bullshit he was up to and once in a blue moon it would cause him to pause.
Once in a blue moon is not enough though. Sure it makes him better than the likes of Ted Cruz but that is not saying much.
Sure, he’d harrumph once in a while, but he’d always go on to vote the party line.
As the deciding vote to put the supremely unqualified DeVos into the Dept of Education, I think we can safely say that most of his grumbling about the president or “Country over party” stuff is lip service at best.
(Likewise, Collins who could have blocked her in committee but instead let her pass and settled for a token “no” vote knowing that she had the confirmation sewn up)