Is it too soon for RUDE PUNDIT's "Dead Senator"? [View all]

[kpete]

8/27/2018
Dead Senator

Senator John McCain was an asshole. But he was the kind of smart, sarcastic asshole that, when he was on your side, you were just jazzed to have fight with you. When you were on the opposite side from him, he was just a fuckin' asshole. To understand the "complexity" of McCain, as so many like to say, is to misunderstand something basic in his nature: he obviously loved being an asshole.

Look, anything anyone writes about McCain, who died this weekend after battling brain cancer, has to acknowledge that the central part of his story is balls-to-the-wall badass, tragic, and heroic. McCain, who was a shitty pilot and a shitty student at the Naval Academy, was shot down in his fighter plane in North Vietnam and was beaten and tortured by his captors. He declined early release because he knew the NVA wanted a propaganda coup for doing it, so he was subjected to more and worse torture. For five years, he endured and then came home. If you want to know why McCain has engendered more sympathy than most figures in American politics, it boils down to the horror he experienced. We saw his sacrifice in every step his damaged body took.

It's too bad that he went through that for a completely useless war, but we're not supposed to say that. We're not supposed to acknowledge that McCain took pleasure in killing "gooks," as he himself said, or that he was likely hitting civilian targets in his bombing runs. But it doesn't take anything away from McCain's genuine heroism in the Hanoi Hilton. It doesn't take away an iota of the pain he suffered or the fact that it would have killed most of us. It's just that we tend to think in simple terms about the complicated reality.

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..... If this post isn't as mean and full of anger as you might have liked, it's probably because I've said so many terrible things about McCain over the years that I don't fucking want to repeat myself. I can't think of what more to say about him. Besides, everyone gets so upset if you say one negative word. People love and are so deeply invested in the lie of McCain, of the honorable public servant, of the war hero, that they don't give a shit that he didn't really do much of anything to help people. They need the lie.

Mourning McCain for most of the nation feels less like mourning a man than mourning an illusion of a lost America where people worked together for a common purpose. It was an illusion that McCain talked about all the time, even in his final message to the American people. Throughout his career, though, McCain did as much as anyone to keep the illusion from becoming reality.

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the rest:
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2018/08/dead-senator.html