John McCain saves the best service to his country for last

President Donald Trump once said he likes people who weren’t captured, a direct swipe at Sen. John McCain.

I’m guessing these days that he despises Arizona’s senior senator.

Perhaps no one is better at making this president look so small.

Trump spent Monday lashing out with lies in response to questions about why he hasn’t contacted the families of four soldiers killed in an Oct. 4 ambush.

McCain, meanwhile, spent Monday delivering an impassioned speech recalling what America represents and repudiating Trump and the nationalist wave he rode in on.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century,” McCain said, “to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last, best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

This, while getting the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal for “a lifetime of sacrifice and service.”

Perhaps never has McCain’s service been as important as now, in this his final term, as time and again he speaks stark truth to power and pleads for this nation and its leaders to be better.

To Congress in July, when he called on his colleagues “to ignore the implacable partisans on either side” and work together on a health-care plan.

“Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and on television and on the internet,” he said. “To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacities are their livelihood.”

And to Trump on multiple occasions, but never more eloquently than on Monday evening when he called on us to remember who we are.

“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” he said, a reference to a Nazi slogan chanted by white supremacists in Charlottesville. “We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t.”

Clearly, McCain’s remarks stung Trump, who on Tuesday responded with a warning to McCain.

“People have to be careful because at some point I fight back,” Trump said. “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”

McCain’s response: “I’ve faced far greater challenges than this.”

Like say, being captured and tortured while a prisoner of war.

Like say, fighting literally for a life as he battles brain cancer.

Like say, fighting, one final time, for the country he loves.

“We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent,” he said. “We wouldn’t deserve to.”