True warrior
McCain sees at the end of his life, a retired lieutenant general from the Air Force named Thomas McInerney, an old man lacking both grace and common decency, goes on the Fox Business Network as if panhandling for relevance and a television job, and says that McCain – who opposes Haspel because he opposes the kind of torture he endured from the Viet Cong – was an example of why torture works.
Then McInerney calls John McCain “Songbird John.”
In that moment McInerney becomes the latest from the bullhorn media to evoke an old country line, the one about the gutter to them not being up. But then this has become the gutter culture of American politics in 2018. This is the America that John McCain sees from Arizona, in a dying light.
I was with him once, the morning after the 2001 World Series, seated next to him on a flight from Phoenix to New York City after the Diamondbacks had beaten the Yankees in Game 7, what McCain told me “was the greatest night in the history of the state of Arizona.” But that wasn’t what I remember most vividly about the day. I had never been in McCain’s presence before, and didn’t fully understand the extent of the damage done to him by the Viet Cong until I saw that he needed help simply to put his sports jacket in the overhead compartment, because he was unable to raise his arms above his shoulders.
“I love the way the team fought back,” he said that morning, and smiled, and said, “I admire that kind of fight.”
It is not just a coarsened America McCain sees. It is his own party, filled with as many cowards as it is, in both the Senate and the House, who refuses to stand up or speak up about what seems like the almost daily assaults on civility and his own kind of honor and the values the country is supposed to represent. There is so much talk these days about the Deep State, as if it is some dark, liberal plot against Donald Trump’s vision for America. That is a laugh. The Deep State is the permanent government of the Republican Party. It is Sen. Mitch McConnell. It is the blessedly outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who endorses the assault on the Department of Justice by the likes of Rep. Devin Nunes. Devin Nunes, who has hijacked the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and almost personally turned “House” and “Intelligence” into an oxymoron.
Nunes’ idea of service now is to do anything and everything to somehow attack the work and, by design, the service of Robert Mueller, who comes out of a different America, and a different sense of honor, the way John McCain does. Mueller was another who served in Vietnam, was wounded fighting for the men with whom he served and for his country; is another sneered at by these phony tough-guy conservatives working in or for this White House.
Now Nunes goes after the DOJ and the FBI and Mueller in a shameful, ongoing attempt to damage Mueller’s investigation of Russian collusion in the last presidential election. It is a different kind of collusion, then, from Nunes, who only in this lightweight Congress could actually possess this kind of power. The Republican Party doesn’t belong to John McCain anymore. It belongs to the likes of Nunes, another mouse who grew up to be a rat.
“The goal is not . . . information,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee said the other day to The New York Times. “The goal is the fight. And the ultimate objective is to undermine the Justice Department, undermine Bob Mueller and give the President a pretext to fire people.”
Once John McCain would have thrown himself into this kind of fight. But he is old and ill with cancer and largely abandoned by the party to which he has devoted 31 years in the Senate and four years in the House before that. He is sneered at by phonies from the White House. This is the America he sees. Just not the one for which he fought and served. This is their America now, not his.
STILL STRONG: