This video from the USA today says about itself:
BREAKING NEWS: John McCain Has Died. Here’s His Great and Terrible Record
Senator John McCain has died. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks down his long record in office.
Senator McCain was a politician of, and the 2008 (defeated) presidential candidate of, the United States Republican party.
The first ever Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.
In the twentieth century, Republican President Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex; which had grown ominously during his presidency. In Eisenhower’s days, the richest 1% people paid about 90 % income tax. And that did not make the sky crashing down on earth, contrary to prophecies of doom by pro-Big Business pundits.
In the twenty-first century of Republican presidents George W Bush and Donald J Trump, their party has degenerated into a party for supporters of endless bloody wars. Into a party of the rich getting ever richer and the poor poorer: the very richest people now pay no tax or hardly any tax, with the consent of both Republican and corporate Democrat politicians. And a party of whitewashing of racism.
This 24 August 2018 video from the USA says about itself:
War Criminal Begs Trump For For-Profit Wars On Fox News
A fairly well-known tactic in today’s political world is this: if you want to get President Donald Trump’s attention, there is no more effective way than to go on Fox & Friends (his favorite television show) and make a public appeal for a policy change.
Read more here.
The war criminal of that video is Erik Prince, Republican party supporter and founder of the infamous Blackwaterparamilitary mercenary corporation. The brother of Trump’s Secretary of (Mis-)Education Betsy DeVos, Prince benefited much from George W Bush’s and Donald Trump’s wars.
This video from the USA says about itself:
Erik Prince‘s Push to Privatize the Afghanistan War
25 August 2018
Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is now lobbying to deploy mercenaries instead of the US military in order to bring the 17-year war in Afghanistan to an end. We discuss the proposal with Antony Loewenstein, author of “Disaster Capitalism”.
How did that shift in the Republican party happen? The 1964 Goldwater presidential candidacy, the Richard Nixon presidency with its pro-racist ‘southern strategy’, the Reagan presidency, the Koch brothers‘ astroturf ‘Tea Party’ with its calls for stoning gays to death, are some of the milestones. What was the role of Senator McCain?
The short answer to that question is: McCain was not always himself on the far right of his party; eg, he voted to stop the ‘Trumpcare’ plan to wreck healthcare. Yet, he contributed to that rightward shift; eg, by his warmongering, his denialism about the economic crisis and his empowering of the lunatic fringe by making Sarah Palin his vice presidential candidate in 2008.
Let us look first at McCain and wars.
The corporate media usually called McCain a ‘war hero’ because he had bombed Vietnam. War hero? Others call him a ‘war hawk’ and ‘war criminal’ for killing Vietnamese civilians and subsequent views on wars.
The brain cancer which killed McCain was possibly caused by toxic Agent Orange dropped massively by the United States Air Force over Vietnam; still killing many Vietnamese civilians and United States and allied veterans.
McCain supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, parts of George W Bush’s ‘war on terror‘.
Yet, he was sometimes critical of the Bush administration’s policies of torture included in that ‘war on terror’. Sometimes: McCain flip-flopped on torture.
He said there should maybe be United States war on Iraq for a hundred more years.
In 2007, he made a notorious propaganda visit to war-stricken Iraq.
On the other hand, McCain was unusually honest for pro-Iraq war politicians as he admitted that war was about oil.
McCain admitted as well that Bush’s Iraq war had killed “hundreds of thousands” of Iraqis. Though that was still less than realistic estimates of over a million dead, it was more than what George W Bush and his warmongering supporters in politics and in the corporate media were willing to admit.
Then, in 2011, came the bloody war for regime change in Libya; when McCain flip-flopped from Gaddafi buddy to buddy of Gaddafi’s al-Qaedaish enemies.
In September 2013, a war escalation in Syria threatened; an escalation in which the United States and other NATO governments would have become allies of ISIS and other jihadists. The peace movement, especially in Britain, just managed to stop it.
Senator McCain then spent the debate on that war threat playing poker on his iPhone. Senator John McCain was not interested in hearing arguments for, and especially not against, war on Syria. He had already said that even the Obama administration’s war plans were not war-like enough, as he wanted an official still bloodier war for regime change. Comedian Will Rogers famously said that he never met anyone he did not like. It looks like John McCain never met a war he did not like.
Well: not completely ‘never’. McCain often flip-flopped; including on wars.
This 2007 video from the USA on political flip-flops is called John McCain vs. John McCain.
Two years after his 2013 failure to have a full-scale Pentagon war on Syria, Senator McCain stoked war in Syria along with the dictatorships Saudi Arabia and Qatar (whose conflict then had not yet become apparent).
A particular low in McCain’s warmongering is his perverting of the Beach Boys song Barbara Ann, changing the words to ‘Bomb, bomb Iran’. Even though McCain’s top strategist was a lobbyist for an Iran-linked corporation.
This 19 April 2007 video shows McCain singing ‘Bomb, bomb, Iran‘.
In economics, McCain, like both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, was a fossil fuel politician, neglecting climate and other environmental hazards. His slogan ‘Drill, baby, drill!‘ advocated more oil drilling, risking more oil spills like the big BP spill.
As for racism, now whitewashed by the Trump administration, some of the origins of its resurgence are in the McCain/Sarah Palin campaign in 2008.
This is a 2008 McCain cartoon by Mikhaela in the USA.
On the eve of the last presidential election debate, Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin faced big losses in public opinion polls because of their negative campaigning and racism among their supporters.
As for the “Hussein” in the cartoon, that’s Obama; not Saddam Hussein whom McCain’s top adviser William Timmons used to work for.
In 2008, singer Madonna even compared McCain to Hitler.
While equating McCain to Hitler definitely goes too far, counterweight to the sycophantic obituaries now in the corporate media is necessary.
The canonization of John McCain: Media, political establishment turn warmonger into saint: here.
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bye-bye!
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