Is It Time for McCain to Go?

Senator John McCain is to many minds a man long past his prime — a Senator who may have decided that in his current role he wields just as much, if not more power than the person in the position he once coveted — the presidency.

As the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — a leadership role he lusted after and finally achieved in 2015 — McCain is now in a position to have a full say on roughly $600 billion worth of defense and military appropriations and hold vast sway over what passes for American foreign policy in many parts of the world.

This continues a long tradition of McCain taking an active role in spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on military hardware, an activity that began in the late 1970s when he served as a Navy liaison to the Senate and gained financing for a supercarrier ship, against the wishes of the Carter administration.

To many people, McCain has long since aligned himself with globalist neoconservative forces and appears to be such a war hawk that he’s been quoted as saying that he wouldn’t object to America keeping a military force stationed in Iraq for the next 100 years. He’s also favored American intervention in Libya, Afganistan, Syria, Georgia, Ukraine and numerous other nations over the years.

It’s interesting to contrast the McCain of today with his stance in 1983, when he criticized then-President Reagan for keeping U.S. troops in Lebanon too long, eventually dooming hundreds of them when their barracks in Beirut were attacked by a suicide bomber. In the 1980s, McCain was also a supporter of Gramm-Rudman legislation that limited government spending when there were federal budget deficits. It’s safe to say that since then, McCain has had quite a change of heart.

In fact, last week McCain slammed Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on the Senate floor for objecting to Montenegro’s proposed incorporation into NATO, which could entail increased military spending or defense commitments by the United States. When Paul registered his objection to the measure, McCain summarily said that effectively, Paul was “working for Vladimir Putin.”

In response, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Paul claimed that the 80-year-old McCain “makes a really, really strong case for term limits; I think maybe he’s past his prime; I think maybe he’s gotten a little bit unhinged.”

It’s quite true that in the 1990s, McCain acquired a reputation as a “maverick” within the GOP because of his tendency to act independently and not be afraid to challenge party leadership, to put it lightly.

Although nominally, McCain is a Republican, he’s no friend of President Donald Trump. McCain has stated he’s anxious to help out in Senate efforts to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia (they’re currently being looked at by the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which McCain is an ex officio member, as well as by the FBI).

In a recent cover story in New York magazine, McCain is profiled as “the fiercest Republican critic of the new administration.” For his part, Trump has said of McCain, “He’s been losing so long he doesn’t know how to win anymore.”

It might not be surprising to know that in the early 1990s, McCain voted for the confirmation of Left-leaning Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. He’s favored abortion and the Transpacific Partnership (TPP).

He co-authored the McCain-Feingold Act, a law that put limits on the amount of “soft money” that could be donated to political campaigns. However, by 1997, McCain became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and openly accepted funds from the wealthy businesses and corporations that were under the purview of this group.

Since 1993, McCain has chaired the globalist International Republican Institute, a body partially that “supports the emergence of political democracy worldwide” (and often encourages military coups d’etat to enable this).

In the 2000s, McCain favored gun control legislation, climate change protections, guest worker and immigrant amnesty programs and the raising of taxes, all unpopular positions within the GOP.

In 2001, McCain hosted Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at his ranch in Arizona. At that time, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “McCain is considering leaving GOP; Arizona senator might launch a third-party challenge to Bush in 2004.”Such a defection would have tipped the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats if McCain joined them.

In 2004, McCain raised speculation that he might consider an extraordinary vice-presidential candidacy under Democratic candidate John Kerry for president; Kerry reportedly offered the slot to McCain, but McCain turned him down after several days’ consideration. The Post article claimed that “whether or not McCain leaves the GOP, he has transformed himself from quirky conservative before the 2000 campaign to spokesman for an embattled progressive wing of the Republican Party today.”

Needless to say, such stories upset his political base of voters in Arizona. In May of 2001, conservatives marched against McCain in his home state, and there were two separate drives to recall him from the Senate. “I voted for him the last time around because I liked what he stood for,” said one voter in Tempe. “But now I want him removed.”

In fact, in Arizona, there remains a large divide between conservative rural voters who very much dislike McCain and urban voters in cities such as Phoenix, who don’t object to him.

As mentioned previously, McCain ran for the presidency — not just once, but twice, losing to former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the first case, McCain harshly criticized conservative religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for being “divisive” and helping Bush.

It’s also worth noting that following the election of 2008, McCain and Barack Obama met many times, and the president consulted with McCain extensively regarding national security. Tipping its hat to the Arizona senator, the liberal New York Times later wrote that McCain “rewrote the part of presidential loser.”

In the election of 2004, the conservative Club for Growth opposed McCain’s reelection, stating, “Our members loathe John McCain.” Still, McCain won the election handily, taking a majority of Democratic votes over little-known opponent Stuart Starky. In 2008, McCain said he would run for reelection in 2010 if Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano accepted a position in the cabinet of Barack Obama; conveniently for McCain, she did.

At the time of the election, Arizona had the second-worst economy of any U.S. state. His early Republican opponent in the 2010 election, Chris Simcox, argued, “John McCain has failed miserably in his duty to secure this nation’s borders and protect the people of Arizona from escalating violence and lawlessness… Coupled with his votes for reckless bailout spending and big government solutions to our nation’s problems, John McCain is out of touch with everyday Arizonans. Enough is enough.”

But after spending $20 million on his campaign (many times what his opponents committed), McCain unfortunately won a fifth term in the Senate.

It should be mentioned that McCain refused to support his presidential running mate Sarah Palin in a possible bid for the presidency in 2012 (she ended up not running). McCain is also remembered for divorcing his first wife, who was disabled, so he could marry his second wife, an heiress to a beer fortune (which many observers say enabled him to win his first political election).

He has associated with and been photographed with disgraced savings-and-loan banker Charles Keating (who donated funds to McCain’s campaigns), Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. McCain has insulted veterans by refusing to fix problems at the Phoenix VA hospital — the worst VA facility in the country.

He refused to make exceptions for World War II veterans wanting to see their new war memorial in Washington, D.C. when President Obama closed the national parks during the last government shutdown, despite many calls from them to do so.

In short, McCain has become arrogant, profligate and callous over the last several decades, and his most recent election flies in the face of national trends toward conservatism, fiscal restraint and nationalism.

If McCain’s erratic and reckless behavior keeps up, it may yet be cause for his constituents to attempt another recall of him from office; to be certain, six years from now is a long time for this determined enemy of the new president to continue causing trouble in Washington, even as he threatens to become the Senate’s oldest-serving member (if and when Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California exits office, as is widely expected in 2018).

~ American Liberty Report


Most Popular

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More



Most Popular
Sponsored Content

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More