McCain’s Brain Versus American Lives and Healthcare
There is no joy here in the Mudville that is Arizona. John McCain may have been somebody that natives like me disfavored from the start because of his hubristic usurpation of a true legend and son of Arizona, John Rhodes, but no one here wanted this.
Not now. Not ever.
So the “press” such as they may be, can run all their blathering hagiographies. Go run with that. It’s what you do, isn’t it?
But, for now, thankfully, McCain is alive and well. I am thankful for that.
And, I hope, at this critical juncture in life, John McCain finds it within himself to realize that the healthcare that has kept him alive, and diagnosed his problems, should NOT be limited to Congresspeople and those that married into money. We all deserve the benefit of what McCain has realized.
John McCain has an opportunity to stand up now for those that have none of his storied display of heroism, nor the benefit of his position. His story, because Mr. McCain was born into military care and then segued into other money and entitlement that does not transfer to most of us. For the common citizens he has always talked about, yet curiously abandoned, when it counted in close measures on the Senate floor, where has John McCain been? Absent, that is where.
The man who lived under the press moniker “Maverick” can ride into the famous sunset of his adopted state by helping real people instead of going out with the McConnell Republicans determined to screw the populous. Who will John McCain be?
Who will John McCain be? The elusive and etherial “Maverick” he has always painted himself as being? Or the reliable vote for craven Republican policies that devastate real citizens? Arizona, indeed America itself, deserves the McCain always portrayed and lionized in his numerous campaigns. Not the guy who always defaulted to the GOP sick and craven core.
Will John McCain have the guts and glory he is famous for, and go out fighting for the common American and their human rights to healthcare and financial and educational stability? The exact things McCain has fatuously blabbered about and never really supported in Congress? Or will he do better?
Who are you truly John McCain? A dying country, in the age of Trump, wants to know.
You have a chance to now be the man you always painted yourself to be. For the sake of this country, please be that man.
Ironic almost beyond belief isn’t it that McConnell last week initially put off the Senate vote on “health care” until McCain returned to the Senate?
While no McCain fan, there is no joy in the Mudville here that is Virginia either.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for this Degenerate Scumbag Crook to Come Around and Change His Stripes. It ain’t happening. McCain’s Part & Parcel, and a large part I’d say, of what’s wrong with America. He’s The Poster Child for Term Limits because Term Limits is the only thing that can extract Creatures like him from Public Office.
Let’s take a a trip in The Wayback Machine, shall we? I have neither joy nor sympathy for McCain and the likes of him. I don’t wish ill-will, but I don’t forgive & forget either. At John McCain’s level, in my opinion, you shouldn’t get Second Chances, or Third Fourth & Fifth Chances, to Do The Right Thing, but McCain and his ilk have A Never-Ending Repository of Chances, and they Pop those Chances like Advil and yet rarely if ever Do The Right Thing. Quite the opposite, actually.
Consider the following when you watch & listen to Lawrence O’Donnell & pretty much the entire Mainstream Media, Conservative & Liberal, lionize McCain and Canonize him as a Political Saint before he’s even Pushing Up Daisies.
From The Phoenix New Times dated 1989. Note the last bolded sentence in the snippet from the article below.
McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five
The GWB “Hug”, and especially his burying findings of the Abramoff investigation for 50 years also come immediately to mind.
Mr. McCain is the son and grandson of Navy admirals. He retired from the Navy as a captain. He grew up as the dependent of a naval officer. As was brought out when he and Ms. Baked Alaska ran for the White House, Mr. McCain also eventually married into a $100+ million fortune. He has additional benefits provided by the VA and Social Security system. Members of Congress, the great majority of whom are multi-millionaires, even have their own full, dedicated clinic in their basement.
As a USG employee his working life – as an officer himself and as a member of Congress – he has enjoyed full medical care. Not a gold plan, not a Cadillac plan – those are epithets invented by the tax dodging wealthy, reluctant to pay for the costs of keeping up the country from which they derive so much – but practical, real, affordable coverage. Americans deserve it as a right.
We can afford access to medical services. But not without reforming a tax system that allows the likes of Mr. Trump and America’s largest corporations to avoid paying taxes while enjoying all the benefits. Not without addressing the profiteering of the insurance industry. Not without the legal, political and social battles such reforms entail. Martin Luther King died, nearly 50 years ago, not long after he realized that his quest for racial justice could go forward only if he joined it with a quest for social and economic justice.
Politics is a contact sport. The ball’s in our court.
Well said, bmaz. Many thanks!
Also, thanks to EoH @8:36
Yes, your Keating days are behind you. Your time to shine was missed because you wanted re-election more than good government.
I’m sorry you were given ONLY 80 years to do the right thing. Squandered your time creating tax cuts for millionaires, scamming the public trust for millionaires, and for enriching your millionaire self.
Maybe now you will take action. A GBM is very quick. Start today or just be seen as another fluffer who got his cumuppance.
o/t for Rayne…continuing the Rohrabacher conversation:
A Top Rohrabacher Aide Is Ousted After Russia Revelations;
The Atlantic; Rosie Gray; 12am ET; 7/20/17
I have to do a little digging into this one — seems so fishy this happened so late into the investigation, doesn’t it? Thanks!
bmaz,
Many thanks.
Great stuff, as always. It’s “populace,” though.
This is beautifully said. Can McCain and others, if they have a shred of decency, muster the strength to stand up for what is right even if it means political suicide? My greatest fear is that the Trump presidency signals a political system that has gone so far off the rails it may not be possible to get it on track.
John Sidney McCain III.
Beat the Keating scandal by being found to be the only one of the five involved to be too stupid to be criminally corrupt.
Probably the greatest flip-flopper of our times. (Maybe finally pre-empted by Trump.)
Brought Sarah Palin to prominence.
He has brain cancer? He is a cancer on the commonweal.
Any sympathy I have for him will have to wait; there’s many ahead of him, including those suffering because of him and his cohort.
Maybe we should start talking about “McCain Care” — shouldn’t everyone have a right to the same kind of good care the Senator will receive? I think McCain himself would want that. All in the US should have that level of care as a basic human right. McCain Care, it’s time is now.
well, keep in mind that McCain would have VA care irrespective of any government policy he may enjoy. Not to mention that his wife Cindy is worth somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million. His level of care is not dependent on his health insurance like the rest of us may be.
Interesting, No one seems to have pointed out the obvious in the Senator McCain Saga:
John McCain was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 1986, assumed the office in January, 1987. In January, 2017 McCain had served ub the U.S. Senate for thirty years. Thirty years in the U.S. Senate, where terms are six years, indicates four re-elections after the first election. Senator McCain, whatever anyone might think of him or his political, or social, views, or his political suppor and Senate voting records, was returned to the U.S. Senate four times by the voters of Arizona.
A virtue of McCain, as a politician, has been that he has always been reasonably straight-forward and out front about his views and his political intentions.
There have been no indications of deception of his constituency by McCain.
Thus, if we could assume that McCain was freely and legitimately elected each of his five times by the voters of Arizona, and that those voters were, each one, a live human constituent, and if we could assume that the live human voters of Arizona had equal opportunity to hear all sides equivalently in each of the five elections in which McCain was elected and re-elected, we would have to have no complaints, since whatever McCain was as a Senator through the years, he would be who the majority of the people of Arizona chose to represent them and present them as a constituency to the rest of the United States, and to the world as a whole in that U.S. Senator capacity.
Any political and politico-social faults McCain would have, and has, presented would be legitimately ascribable to the people of Arizona, who would have proofed their satisfaction, again and again, with his representation of them.
Senator McCain, through the last thirty years, has been the people of Arizona. Or he would have been if Arizona election processes provided all Arizonans’ views equivalent exposure in an equalized and equal forum for presentation, and if Arizona voter polling was legitimately honest and with proofing of being so, with provably no voting-machine manipulating, modifying or count manipulatings or adjustings.
Was McCain truly representative of real majorities of Arizonans each and all of his six-year terms?
Or was he put into office by a manipulating minority and kept there by manipulations of campaigning opportunities and votes and vote-countings?
Common-Pot Election Funding, where all who desire to contribute to election campaigning (real or corporate persons, pacs, super-pacs and all other contribution-consolidating entities) may contribute each one as much as each might desire (even unto and into the billions, or trillions), with all going into a common-pot for equal distributions in each phase of elections, to provide each and everey candidate equal opportunity to obtain equal exposure for his and her political and social views and perceptions; this to provide voters equal exposure to, and opportunity to evaluate, each and every candidate’s positions and views equivalently; and then triple-human-countings and collations of paper-ballots, to insure that all voters are humans, who willingly and knowingly, chose, for themselves, to participate in in the decision-making process, would, and will, if implemented, provide best guarantee that who might be elected would indeed be the chosen representative of the people they represent, through being selected by democratic process by the majority.
Since McCain was not elected in campaigns held to Common-Pot standards and giving each candidate’s presentations in each ‘race’ equal voice and presentation opportunity, and since elections in Arizona, and the machinery used in vote registering and counting, are not policed to maintain integrity and coerce honesty, we cannot know more than that McCain was not a Ronald Reagan, that he was honest in his expressions of his views and in his straightforward presentations of them.
The rest, including how much McCain might have been influenced to hold and support the views he honestly expressed, and how much he might have toadied to interests who remunerated him, for desire to hold his office and continue in it and continue enjoying the powers it provided him (and through him those who maintained and manipulated him).