It seems that the worst person in American public life — an elderly gentleman who simply refuses to get off the stage, especially now that he’s back in the good graces of his liberal admirers in the media — is up to his old tricks. On a visit to Munich this weekend, John McCain criticized President Trump, praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and generally trampled all over the old adage that politics ends at the water’s edge.
But then, McCain has never let niceties like manners, party loyalty, or just plain human decency knock him off his largely imaginary moral high horse. Regrettably returned to office last year by the foolish voters of Arizona, McCain has another six years of stabbing his ostensible allies in the back while busily trying to drag the United States into another purposeless war with just about any country you can think of. It would take Sigmund Freud to figure out McCain’s particular pathology, a combination of arrogance, privilege, guilt and political impotence that ill serves the country he claims to love.
Finally, one of his colleagues in the Senate has had the guts to call him out:
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Sunday warned against taking seriously comments his Senate colleague John McCain of Arizona made on Saturday, in which the Arizona lawmaker compared President Trump’s actions toward the press to “how dictators get started.”
“The thing is, I don’t agree with his analysis and applying that to the president,” Paul told Jon Karl, guest host of ABC’s “This Week.” “Everything that [McCain] says about the president is colored by his own personal dispute he’s got running with President Trump and it should be taken with a grain of salt, because John McCain’s the guy that’s advocated for war everywhere. He would bankrupt the nation.”
Paul, known for his non-interventionist foreign policy, also expressed relief that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee did not have a chance to act on his views as a commander in chief. “And actually, we’re very lucky John McCain’s not in charge because I think we would be in perpetual war,” Paul said.
As if we’re not already, one might observe. Everywhere McCain goes, trouble seems to follow; his latest run of destabilization includes meddling in Egypt, Libya and Syria, all of which ended in death and disaster. Now he’s itching to mix it up with Russia over the Ukraine and Crimea — a sure-fire losing battle, since the Russians will never return Crimea and will gobble up as much of the Ukraine as they like, and there’s not a damn thing anybody will or should do about it.
So good for Sen. Paul. More of his colleagues on the Republican side — McCain still is nominally a Republican, isn’t he? — need to do the same, and even more bluntly. McCain has transcended simply being an embarrassing fool: he’s now a dangerous fool as well.
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