Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Wonder How Many Of Those Out Of Order Provisions The Instantly Hypocitical John McCain Will Vote For Today

I haven't kept track but from what I've heard, John McCain's big speech yesterday about the virtue of regular order, as part of his excuse for furthering the Republican plan to kill tens of thousands and deny tens of millions of Americans healthcare, his great pose of principle didn't make it past the first vote as he voted to push the appallingly bad Cruz amendment, something outside of any regular order of the Senate, forward.

John McCain had two motives in yesterday's vote, to get back at Barack Obama by trying to destroy his major achievement as President and to get himself on camera striking a pose and spouting platitudes which he had no intention of following through on.  In his case, the very vote he came to cast for the entirely out of order repeal of the ACA proved he didn't mean a word of it.   John McCain is an empty suit, he has always been pretty much the same person who struck a pose for the camera and then supported some of the most depraved of Republican positions as he basked in the media limelight given to him for striking the pose.

This is politics as show biz, something which certainly has always been there.  The regular pose of virtue and morality which will be carried by the media - especially when it is a Republican doing the posing, even when they know the man or woman is actually a vile, corrupt, cruel sociopath.   Often it will be on the basis of some alleged regional virtue, often asserted for those from the Mid-West.  Chuck Grassley, as cold-blooded and cruelly indifferent a partisan sleaze has benefitted from his voice, annoyingly similar to Jimmy Stewart in its inflection.  In McCain's case, it is in part due to his having been a POW and partly the a figure of the mythic movie West, about as real as any seen on TV.

I have not ever expected better of John McCain than what he has delivered. Any expectation I might have very temporarily had that he would be a better kind of Republican probably died in the 1980s, Though it was so temporary that I don't remember ever buying the media myth.  His choice of Sarah Palin to run as his Vice President, probably about the worst person he could have ever considered and elevated to national prominence is a far, far better indication of who he really is, who he always was than any speech he gave or might still give.  When you wonder what kind of person John McCain is, when anyone asks that, they should be told he's the kind of person who thought Sarah Palin was qualified to be president of the United States, the kind of person who voted for Mitch McConnell to try to kill tens of thousands of Americans and to deny health care to tens of millions more, the kind of person who - if some analysts are right - will help Mitch McConnell to recess the Senate so Trump can set off his super-Saturday Night Massacre scenario which will ultimately get Robert Mueller fired and try to stop the investigation into the Trump Treason of the country.  I don't think there is any overestimating the willingness of John McCain to be a partisan hypocrite, not after today.

Senatorial comity has always been just about the cheapest, most cloying and hypocritical of melodramas.  It has always disgusted me.  It is disgusting how people who do such terrible things that kill and harm millions can make so nice with each other. It makes you wonder if any of them really care that their colleagues are the kind of people who will kill people to give money away to billionaires.

1 comment:

  1. Amazing how shameless public figures can be, isn't it? McCain has said one thing and done another his entire political career. It doesn't shame him, and yet we admire him and denigrate Trump. It's almost a fair question to ask what the difference is.

    And if there was a picture of me in circulation like the one of Blake Farenthold below, I'd retire to a desert retreat and hope humanity eventually forgot my name and my existence. I suppose being a public figure means, first, you have to have no shame....

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