It is a sad commentary on the current state of not only American politics but also American civility that the death of a prominent U.S. Senator (and decorated veteran) is a cause for partisan fighting. Nevertheless, as the death of John McCain has illustrated, that's where we are.
In the past, flying the American flag at the White House at half-staff would have been a given, a fact worthy of no more in the news than a brief acknowledgement. Instead, under T****, it became a source of headlines over a period of several days. First, the flag was flown at half-staff for a day, along with a T**** tweet that expressed family condolences but nothing else. The next day, the flag was back to full staff, at which point a media firestorm erupted that ultimately brought veterans groups into the fray. This apparently let T**** to conclude something that would have been obvious from the beginning not only to any experienced politician but to any human being with an iota of common sense: spitting on the memory of a war hero makes other war heroes, the kind that vote regularly, deeply unhappy. Ultimately, T**** reversed course, lowered the flag again, and followed up with a tweet on McCain closer to the one he should have originally sent.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but for the record: all of this from a man who objects to NFL players of color using the National Anthem as a background for making a point about a public issue.
I think we can say that this is the juncture at which the T**** hypocrisy has gone from epic to galactic.
When it comes to John McCain, of course, there are two, albeit interrelated sides to his story: his military service, which deserves to be exalted, and his political career, which can be said to be something of a mixed bag. To get some idea of the extend to which the latter is true, take a look at this, and then take a look at this. The latter is worth noting especially in the context of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, at which point he had moved away from the center and more toward the politically-correct extreme-right ideology that defines the modern Republican Party. Nevertheless, he still tried to conduct his campaign on the assumption that all of us are citizens of the same democracy, worthy of respect for that reason alone, and that elections were the arena for sorting out our differences on how to govern the country, not for promoting gossip and slander about each other. This moment has been circulated a great deal over the past several days, but it's worth sharing any number of times, in part because it makes my point about his conduct in 2008.
McCain received a great deal of criticism from within his own party for his defense of Barack Obama, and some of that criticism suggested that he lost that election in part because he was not tougher on Obama personally. To a degree, this line of "thinking" is meant to explain the subsequent rise of the Tea Party, the "birther" movement, and T****'s presidency.
The problem with it, however, is that it is both unfair to McCain, and unfair to reality.
John McCain didn't lose the presidency because he failed to launch a success ad hominem campaign against Obama. He didn't even lose because, to borrow a phrase, he selected a running mate with the apparent I.Q. of a dead flashlight battery (although G-d knows she didn't help). He lost because he was the candidate of a political party bereft of new ideas, and hopelessly wedded to ideas whose history carries the overwhelming stench of failure.
Until the September Wall Street crash, the polls and pundit consensus was that, in spite of public antipathy for the Iraq war, the election was McCain's to lose. I am neither a pollster or a paid media pundit, but I can tell you that, based on having followed elections (up to that point) for 40 years, I thought that the election was McCain's to lose. I saw Obama as (compared to Hillary, whom I had supported in the primaries) too liberal and too inexperienced to successfully compete against McCain. Obviously, I was wrong, and I'm delighted that this was the case. But it was the crash that gave Obama the opening he needed to get his message across to enough voters that he could win.
And the crash was the inevitable love-child of two failed policies joined at the hip: tax cuts paid for with Federal Reserve debt, and two wars paid for the same way. The history of Vietnam and the Reagan years should have taught Republicans to know better. But the Republican Party is no longer a political party because it no longer incubates ideas. It is a cult of fanatics who think that history will inevitability award their unwillingness to learn, when in fact history teaches exactly the opposite: those who cannot adapt do not survive.
John McCain did not let the Republican Party down, anymore than he let his country down in Vietnam. The GOP let McCain down. As well as his country, its supporters, and itself. This leaves we the people, we the living, to continue to do what he expected us to do in 2008: sort through our differences without losing faith in each other or in ourselves. And, above all, without weaponizing the flag that is designed to bring us together.
As for the senator, fair winds and following seas to the far horizon, and peace and grace to his family and friends.
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