John McCain To Resign Senate Seat on the 4th of July, Says Aide. Cindy McCain Offered his SeatSince when does John McCain care about supporting anything Donald Trump does? Color me skeptical!
McCain says Moore should drop out immediately based on simply the seriousness of the allegations. No "if true" for John McCain.
I seem to recall McCain was hit with a sexual impropriety claim when he was running. Remind me--Did he drop out of the race then?
On Tuesday evening, three prominent Republicans — Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney — endorsed the left-wing media’s preferred narrative and embraced the masked thugs of Antifa as heroes.Read more here.
...The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the finest expressions of uncompromising principle in human history. In order to maintain that standard, we must protect speech and assembly rights for the unsavory, and then use free speech to demolish their toxic ideas. Professing allegiance to the First Amendment while authorizing vigilante gangs to shut down disapproved speech with the Heckler’s Veto — or clubs and broken bottles, when the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t get the job done — is not good enough. “The First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech” is a much more dangerous, far more contagious fascist ideal than anything snarled over a tiki torch in Charlottesville.
Frankly, if you can’t win an argument with a handful of Nazis without resorting to violence, you suck at freedom. If you can’t damn the swastika without also cursing the hammer and sickle, you suck at history.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been diagnosed with brain cancer, the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix said Wednesday.Read more here.
The tumor was discovered after the senior Arizona senator underwent a minor procedure last week to remove a blood clot from above his left eye.
"Subsequent tissue pathology revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot," the hospital said in a statement.
The Times forefronts this statement from John McCain:Read more here.
“Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying,” Mr. McCain said on Fox News.
Is that the language of diplomacy? If Trump had said "Vladimir Putin is a thug, bully and a murderer," he'd have been regarded as a lout who doesn't have any idea how to talk like a President. But here's McCain saying that anyone who doesn't use that kind of crude, brutal language is a "liar." You're a liar if you don't baldly insult the world leaders you're trying to deal with? Yet somehow Trump is portrayed as the off-the-rails hothead and McCain is the wise, elder statesman.
I'm just teasing, saying "somehow." I know how, and you do too. McCain got defeated in his bid for President. If he, a Republican, were running for President or had been elected President, his words would be presented as evidence — part of a swell of evidence — of his unfitness. Safely defeated, McCain is the quotable statesman — quotable because he usefully disparages the Republican who did get elected.
Now, I'm at the end of the article, and I see what I suppose is meant to support the assertion that the search for a secretary of state has been "chaotic." Trump looked first to Rudy Giuliani and then moved to Mitt Romney, and then Kellyanne Conway spoke openly about Trump supporters who opposed Romney. Thereafter:
Mr. Tillerson emerged as a contender on the strong recommendations of James A. Baker III, the secretary of state under President George Bush, and Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, according to a person briefed on the process.
Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon argued for Tillerson, then Trump met with him for 2+ hours on Saturday and made the decision. Is that "chaotic"? I can't help feeling that if Hillary Clinton were picking a Secretary of State through a process like that it would have been presented as methodical, careful, and beautifully indicative of a brilliantly competent presidency to come.
On the matter of McCain, in June 1998 the Senator stood up to address a Republican fundraising meeting: "You think that was a tasteless joke?" he began, referring to the previous speaker's closing Viagra gag. "Listen to this one." He then told the following side-splitter:Read more here.
"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
"Because her real father's Janet Reno."
Rimshot. In just twelve words, Senator McCain insulted not the President himself but the three women closest to him (officially, that is): he said the kid's a dog, the First Lady's an adulterous lesbian, and the Attorney-General's an unconvincing transvestite.
Is this as bad as mocking a guy's 40-year-old military service? Well, it's certainly ungallant. From the perspective of 2015, I have no respect whatsoever for any of the trio, but I would not mock their looks, orientation or alleged possession of male genitalia. At the time young Chelsea had just turned 18. Is it more disreputable for a grown man to insult in public a rich, powerful senator's war record than a teenage girl's looks? Whatever the answer, a chap who's done the latter has no business complaining about the former.
Back in '98, the real punchline to McCain's joke came in the deafening silence of the American media: like a genteel dowager on the 'bus trying to avoid catching the eye of the gibbering derelict, the press decided not to notice. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote a piece alluding to it, but without repeating the joke, which rendered her column entirely incomprehensible to anybody but Beltway insiders. The only reason I know the joke happened is because some guy called Steyn wrote about it in a foreign publication and rose to young Chelsea's defense. As I put it all those years ago, "Personally, I find Chelsea rather fetching in a coltish sort of way" - and Page Six of The New York Post excitedly reported this breaking news under the headline "Fetching Filly". It's an odd sort of war hero who picks on little girls.
The media blackout of 1998 is in striking contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump's "gaffe". Two decades back, the media loved McCain because he was their kind of Republican: that's to say, he spent more time attacking other Republicans than he ever did Democrats. And they wanted him to keep on doing that, so they closed ranks around him. Whereas no one wants what Trump wants to talk about to be part of the 2016 election conversation, so anything must be seized on to disqualify him from participation. And, if nothing else is to hand, a sneer at John McCain will have to do.
The thing is McCain's Chelsea Clinton gag is not untypical. Anyone who's "worked with Senator McCain" in the Senate these last gazillion years knows he has a short fuse. In late 1999, attacking as is his wont his fellow Republican, he told Senate budget committee chairman Pete Domenici that "only an asshole would put together a budget like this". Domenici rose to his feet and said, with wounded dignity, that in all his years in the Senate no one had ever called him that.
"I wouldn't call you an asshole unless you really were an asshole," said McCain.
Hmm. If this were a Jackie Collins novel, you'd be beginning to suspect that McCain and Trump were twins separated at birth: two men who disagree on everything else but are united in their belief that every other prominent Republican is an asshole.
McCain was projecting with respect to poor old Pete Domenici. Forty years ago, John McCain was a war hero. Since then he's mostly been an asshole. The problem is you can't out-asshole Donald Trump. McCain is in the Superbowl of assholery and hopelessly outmatched. He was doing assholery-as-usual last week, sneering at Trump's supporters as "the crazies". On recent polls that's getting on for 20 per cent of the Republican vote. If 20 per cent of Republican "crazies" take the same umbrage at McCain's sneer that Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Reince Preibus et al have taken on McCain's behalf at Trump's, then Hillary will be President with a Democratic Senate and maybe even House.
And yet no Republican "leader" objected to McCain's characterization of the base. Only Donald Trump did, and in doing so flung the crazy back in McCain's face. And all those hitherto somnolent Republican "leaders" stood on their dignity to insist that there was no place in their party for people who disrespect John McCain... no, make that all POWs... no, make that all veterans. McCain himself insisted that Trump didn't owe an apology to him but to all those who've served in the armed forces. So now John McCain is the personal embodiment of the entire US military? Trump didn't insult any of them, he insulted you, and you alone. I dislike the idea of protected classes of persons, and find the notion that John McCain is apparently the Caitlyn Jenner of the right not only faintly risible but, in terms of crude political advantage, unlikely to be as effective.
Trump's right: This country treats its veterans appallingly, far worse than most other civilized societies, consigning far too many to food stamps and entrapping them in a third-class health-care system. A New Hampshire neighbor of mine, a Vietnam vet exposed to Agent Orange and thus given cancer as a war-losing bonus, just received the usual letter from the VA telling him his benefits were being cut. Oddly enough, he loathes McCain and is gung-ho for Trump. Do you want to bet he's in a minority down at the Legion? John McCain doesn't embody the grand variety and diversity of America's warriors; John McCain embodies John McCain: That's it. So, when the Republican establishment spends two news cycles huffing about the amour propre of a wealthy career politician, they're only reinforcing Trump's critique: that the GOP is a party of "losers" and "failures" obsessed with peripheral trivia nobody else cares about, while ignoring everything that's killing your future.
And Finally, re that "asshole" business, I should add that I don't mean it as a criticism. Personally, I'd like it if Calvin Coolidge were on the ticket, or indeed the Marquess of Salisbury. But they've decided to sit out Campaign 2016, so one must take what one can get. And a citizenry that votes for an asshole is less deluded than one that votes for a messiah. Thus, voting for, say, Silvio Berlusconi (a kind of wealthier mini-Trump, and yet the third longest serving prime minister in Italian history, after Mussolini and Giolitti) is less psychologically unhealthy than voting for Barack Obama. And, come to that, less damaging to republican virtue than voting for the previous guy's wife or brother.
Still, we are speaking about degrees of assholery here. I can't quite honestly imagine how big an asshole I'd have to be to tell that Chelsea Clinton joke into a live microphone, as John McCain did. But if "there's a place in our party" for such a man, there's certainly no reason why there shouldn't also be a place for Donald Trump.
So maybe now the Republican bigshots could drop the queeny hysteria and begin talking about something - anything - that matters?
We just had one Know-Nothing Know-It-All Princeling as President; I'm not sure I'd like to see a different variation of the breed.Read more here.
Trump is being attacked, let's be honest, because we are powerless to attack the real evil in our presence.
We can't defeat obama or clinton or msnbc or Planned Abortionhood, or even Bernie Sanders. So we claw at the easy targets. This week it's Trump. Next week it will Ann Coulter or Rush. After that it will be Franklin Graham for something he said.
IMO, he was useful, because he turned the heat on the other GOP candidates. However, saying stupid stuff like this discredits him, and by extension, the issues he raises. The GOPe will now simply dismiss anti-amnesty as the ravings of a self-indulgent clown.
Not offended by what Trump said. I AM greatly offended by the existence and prominence of John Kerry, who DID insult me and all my brethren.
the north vietnamese wanted to trade back McCain, ahead of everyone else, because his dad was an Admiral, and they sought to curry favor.
McCain insisted on staying with the guys, and only going when they all went.
He stayed for seven years.
Yes, that's a heroic thing.
what's trump's claim to heroism? Saving the Miss Universe pageant from chapter 11?
If Trump goes away, you will get another safe, mushy campaign of cold oatmeal.
After which the Jeb loses like a Gentleman.
Trump's a rich butthead, and I really don't want him to win, but against this field of milk toasts and wieners, what are people supposed to do?
The absurd (and predictable) part of all this is -- watch the MSM suddenly take up the cause of honorable POWs grievously hurt by Trump.
I thought the Tea Partiers were getting excessively hostile and mean in their criticisms. But then the Establishment lived down to its reputation. Rather than taking the long and sober view of things -- that a political coalition depended on at least some reserve of intraparty amity -- they showed their full contempt of the Tea Party and essentially declared them enemies.Go here to read more.
The GOP won the elections of 2014 -- and lost their future. The Establishment basically declared war on the most vital and numerous part of the coalition, and stopped even pretending to tolerate them.
We're seeing that again with the Paul/McCain dispute.
...And I don't think that bodes well for the future. You can't combine against an enemy when you view the other factions of the right as the enemy.
