The following excerpt – from “Checkmated on Crimea, Obama Plays for Rest of Ukraine,” March 7, 2014 – reflects the kind of criticism I’ve been leveling against John McCain for years for displaying a rash and bellicose temperament that is unbecoming of a U.S. senator, let alone a U.S. president:
A number of you have asked in recent days what I think of U.S. politicians like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing Obama of being weak and having a “feckless” foreign policy. Suffice it to know that, if it were up to these warmongering fools, U.S. troops would now be dying by the hundreds trying to do in Iran, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine what they tried to do in Iraq.
Thank God that, unlike George W. Bush, Obama is strong enough to base U.S. foreign policy on what is in the national interest instead of on what will impress neo-con war hawks. Not to mention that, listening to them, you’d never know Obama has killed many more real al-Qaeda terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, in places like Pakistan and Yemen than Bush killed during his misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the biggest (and most tragic) mistake of Obama’s presidency was allowing politicians like McCain and Graham to goad him into “surging” more troops into Afghanistan to serve as little more than sitting ducks for Taliban fighters.
But their unwitting championing of Putin as a more admirable leader than Obama betrays the fact that far too many Republicans hate their president more than they love their country. Which is why they will say or do anything to undermine his presidency — the welfare of the country be damned.
___________________
Except that McCain has always enjoyed such hero worship in public life that my criticisms have invariably been decried as political blasphemy. This, notwithstanding that his reputation as a national war hero is based solely on the recklessness and/or incompetence he displayed as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, which resulted in him getting shot down and spending most of that war in a prison camp.
(He’s fond of citing, as a badge of honor, the recklessness and/or incompetence that resulted in him graduating at the bottom of his class from the Naval Academy at Annapolis.)
In any event, McCain vindicated every criticism I’ve ever leveled against him yesterday when he declared what he would do if he were president about the hundreds of schoolgirls Nigerian thugs kidnapped a month ago:
‘I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country,’ McCain told The Daily Beast Tuesday. ‘I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan,’ he added, referring to the president of Nigeria.
Of course, it’s not exactly a surprise that McCain holds this view. He’s been a long-time advocate for increased U.S. military activity in crises around the globe — from Syria to Ukraine.
(The Daily Beast, May 13, 2014)
Well, perhaps the early onset of dementia has robbed McCain of the awareness that Obama demonstrated this kind of decisiveness and strength when he sent in U.S. troops to get bin Laden without Pakistan’s permission. But Obama did so to get the man responsible for killing almost 3,000 American citizens. By contrast, a president McCain would be sending in U.S. troops as an international SWAT team everywhere, doing everything from fighting other countries’ civil wars to rescuing kidnap victims as in this case. Never mind that the United States acting as the self-appointed policeman of the world is every bit as outdated and discredited as the United Kingdom acting as the self-appointed colonizers of the African Continent.
Let me hasten to clarify, however, that you should not be misled by the wanton (and arguably racist) disrespect McCain shows for Goodluck Jonathan, the democratically elected president of the most populous country in Africa. Because the most outrageous part of his declaration, by far, is the reckless disregard he shows for the lives of American soldiers – who he clearly thinks are as expendable as aerial drones.
Frankly, John McCain is to Congress what Donald Sterling is to the NBA. Unfortunately, Congress does not have the institutional integrity that is compelling the NBA to get rid of Sterling.
Related commentaries:
Checkmated on Crimea…
Kidnapping Nigerian schoolgirls…