The Pettiness of a Tiny Man

So yesterday was a crazy day - ain't it always down this Darkest Timeline - but this was something that stood out. Via the Navy Times but based on a report from the Wall Street Journal (firewalled):

The Navy was reportedly directed by the White House to keep the destroyer John S. McCain hidden during a Memorial Day visit by President Donald Trump to U.S. Fleet Activities Yokosuka.

A May 15 email obtained by the Wall Street Journal revealed instructions from White House staff in preparation for the president’s planned speech to about 800 sailors and Marines aboard the Japan-based amphibious assault ship Wasp, which is based in the same port as the McCain.

The email, which was reportedly shared between a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command official, Air Force officials and the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, featured two instructions pertaining to the logistics of the president’s speaking engagement.

It was the third and final instruction that came as a surprise.

“USS John McCain needs to be out of sight,” the email stated, according to the WSJ. “Please confirm #3 will be satisfied.”

The orders may not have come directly from trump, but I'm willing to bet he's expressed enough anger towards John McCain the person to make it clear to trump's handlers that the Navy vet/POW hero/Congressman/Senator was persona non grata and it included the ship named in McCain's honor. And that led to trump's people going out of their way to be as petty and vindictive as their bad boss.

I'm not angry at the Navy for how they handled this - by blocking McCain crewmembers from even attending trump's appearances if they wanted to - I'm angry at trump. I'm angry at the environment he creates around himself, one of vanity and arrogance and petty viciousness. I'm angry at his lackeys, all so eager and willing to suck up to a man whose hatred for other people is on constant display.

What was it about McCain that seems to drive trump to such vindictive acts? trump had insulted and dismissed McCain for years ever since trump's campaigning in 2015. trump mocked the fact that McCain's heroism was mostly due to getting shot down and caught as a POW during Vietnam.

trump continually acts as though he honestly doesn't understand why everyone else revered McCain in ways they will never worship himself.

A lot of it has to do with trump's World View. To him, everything is Winners and Losers. And trump himself must never be a Loser, he must always project himself as a Winner because that's how people will admire you.

And yet there's McCain. Not the top of his graduation class from the Naval Academy, who got much of his early breaks because - like trump - his family was connected (Admirals all). Not the best politician, who got caught up in the S&L scandals of the 1980s. Someone who tried to run for President in 2000 and got stomped by Dubya. Someone who ran for President as the Republican nominee and got stomped by Obama.

And yet everybody loved him, revered him. McCain was a darling of the Beltway media. Even Centrist Democrats (and even a few Progressives) applauded him from time to time for any "honorable" stances he would commit every so often to keep his statesman cred going.

That was the thing, what trump could never comprehend. The thing about McCain that drives him mad to this day.

McCain, for all his political partisanship, was still a genuinely honorable American. Given an opportunity as a POW to leave the prison - as a PR stunt by the North Vietnamese - McCain refused because his honor told him the prisoners ahead of him should go first. Given opportunities when campaigning for President, McCain always played to a broad consensus, trying to present himself as a reformer and bipartisan figure (he still voted the GOP line more often than not, obviously).

And above all, McCain showed respect to others. I wrote about this when he died:

But there will be moments that stick out for me, the moments when he tried to speak to our better angels during a bitter 2008 campaign, when the Far Right media was going out of its way to fearmonger about Obama. In a place and in front of people who could have turned against him, McCain spoke well of his Democratic opponent, tried to speak to a "respectful" position that tried to make it clear that while Republican and Democrat may be on opposite sides of an argument we were all still Americans...

McCain campaigned against Obama as a liberal, McCain campaigned against Obama as a "weak and inexperienced" figure, but McCain NEVER campaigned against Obama as a human being.

That was something trump will never, can never do. trump simply can't comprehend "honor" as a personal habit. There has never been anything honorable in trump's entire career as a bankrupt businessman, con artist, and foreign stooge.

And so McCain sticks like a spur under trump's skin, probably far more than anyone else save for Hillary and Obama.

And so trying to hide McCain's very memory becomes the only thing trump's lackeys can do.

If trump were an honest man, he would express his displeasure at the things McCain did to hamper trump's plan to nuke Obamacare but then move on. (trump also wouldn't have cheated with Russia's help to steal the 2016 elections) If trump were merely calculating, he'd figure out more subtle ways to commit his revenge in less public ways. If trump were savvy, he'd play the role of respectful rival, try to co-opt some of McCain's personal touch to gain support among those who still honor him.

But trump is none of those things. trump is a vain, petty, insufferable bully who can never respect anyone who can lose and roll on to other accomplishments in life. trump is an unthinking mite who thinks himself mighty because he cheats and steals his way to victory.

It will be telling to history that the USS McCain will continue sailing on while the best trump can hope for is getting a garbage scow named after himself.

Respectful: The Passing of John McCain

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act I)

So the news came tonight that Sen. John McCain, former Presidential candidate in 2008, primary challenger in 2000, passed away from the brain cancer that plagued him his final year.

Much of McCain's biography - the reckless youth of being a Navy family brat, the wartime pilot shot down over Vietnam and tortured as a POW, the years of Arizona politics from Congressman to Senator to Presidential hopeful - will get rehashed elsewhere, here I need to speak to the personal feelings I have for the man and for the Republican Party he tried to lead for the last twenty or so years.

Back in those days, before I turned Apostate, I tried being a Republican along the moderate lines of an Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt. By 2000 that meant following McCain, who presented himself as a Reformer with regards to elections/campaigning and other issues (although on key GOP issues like abortion and tax cuts he remained devout). I followed McCain because the alternative was George W. Bush (aka Bush the Lesser), and by 2000 I had no love for the Bush family at all. Jeb in particular - pandering SOB who fell assbackwards into the Florida governorship in 1998 - had earned my personal hatred for a hundred lifetimes.

But I truly believed McCain was genuine, a possible chance at getting a Republican candidate who had the charm and political will to make effective changes. I was angry at the party sabotage of his South Carolina primary, and I regretted the fact that by the time I was in the streets of Ft. Lauderdale waving McCain signs that March that McCain had to suspend his efforts.

I will still argue - for all that I know today about McCain and all the other possibilities between then and now - that if McCain had been the GOP nominee in 2000, our nation would have been better off than the disaster that ended up being the Dubya years.

I lost a lot of admiration for him during the 2008 campaigning, when he kept pandering to the GOP deep-pockets and kept making grandiose promises that ended up being staged phoniness. I still can't believe he stood up David Letterman on the excuse of responding to the Economic Meltdown of 2007-08, only to end up getting caught on-camera preening for yet another Beltway talking head show. Why did you sink that low, boss?

But there will be moments that stick out for me, the moments when he tried to speak to our better angels during a bitter 2008 campaign, when the Far Right media was going out of its way to fearmonger about Obama. In a place and in front of people who could have turned against him, McCain spoke well of his Democratic opponent, tried to speak to a "respectful" position that tried to make it clear that while Republican and Democrat may be on opposite sides of an argument we were all still Americans:

"No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not (an Arab). Thank you."

He respected others. At the end of the day, despite political pandering at times, despite sticking to agendas that were oft-times partisan, McCain kept the Faith. He kept the Faith about America and about fellow Americans and did what he could to keep his party base from going off the rails into the pit of race hatred and worse.

That and the fact McCain had a level of self-deprecating humor that made him a decent Saturday Night Live host.

It's a damn shame McCain died knowing full well the current bastard in the White House took the dark and easy path of racial pandering, the path McCain refused to take. In the end, McCain was willing to risk the loss of 2008 to retain his own integrity, an integrity the cheater in 2016 never had.

There was little love lost between McCain and trump: McCain the military man who suffered as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam, trump the goddamned draft dodger who had the discourtesy to insult McCain for being a "loser" who got caught and tortured. This is how our nation is right now: the worst possible man with political power, likely mocking the more honorable soul whose passing will be better remembered. If anything, McCain will have the last laugh: Obama was invited to speak at McCain's funeral, not trump.

I shook McCain's hand once. It might have been 2005 (maybe 2004), and it was before he broke my heart in 2008. While working at the University of Florida, I came across a setup in the Reitz Union grass plaza for a graduation ceremony and found out that he would be the honored speaker. I took a seat along one aisle, not realizing it would be the aisle where the parade would head to the stage. So there I was completely surprised and shaking his hand and telling him I voted for him in 2000 and he smiled and nodded and that was about it.

McCain will likely be the last Republican I will ever respect, even just a bit, even through all the disagreements I eventually had when he surrendered enough of his identity as a "reformer" for party power in 2008 and afterward.

I grew to regret what had happened, partly despairing that a lot of it was because his Republican Party kept sinking into that racist fearmongering morass, and that rather than reform it or abandon it to retain his honor he sank with it. But in some respects a Great Man has passed, possibly the last one who tried to save something that didn't want to be saved.

I am looking up in the sky tonight for comets. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Republicans Don't Give a Rat's Ass About the Constitution Anymore

(Update: Thank you Batocchio for the link on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! To everyone visiting, hello again. Please stay and check out my other rants about Gods help us everything about this election cycle. And please, sign up for NaNoWriMo and write your damn novels next November!)

You lost me, McCain, a long time ago, but this just really hurts:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested Monday that the Republican party’s months-long refusal to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court could extend into the next administration if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up," McCain said on WPHT Philadelphia radio in an interview first flagged by CNN. "I promise you. This is where we need the majority.”

McCain essentially promised that the Republicans in the Senate will not uphold their oath of office to the Constitution.

He promised to put party partisanship ahead of the needs of the United States to have judicial offices filled in order to ensure our legal system is working.

He promised to ignore the constitutional powers of the President to nominate people to fill vacancies in the court system. He promised to ignore the reality that a President Clinton would win election with a sizable number of American voters.

He promised that if Hillary Clinton wins with lets say 60 million votes to lets say 50 million Trump votes, he and his fellow Republicans will tell those 60 million voters that their vote did not ever count, that their choice wasn't legitimate, that they will never listen to or respect those voters.

He promised to continue the obstruction that this current Republican-controlled Senate has been carrying on for almost a year now, refusing to even LISTEN to Supreme Court nominee Garland, operating on a laughable and possibly illegal argument that the Senate should "hold off" on allowing a lame-duck President during his last year in office from filling any vacancies: That the Senate should "respect the wishes of the voters during an election year." Yet if those voters go with Clinton, well they'll just ignore THIS YEAR'S promise and move on to this new promise of NEVER advising and consenting to a Democratic nominee ever again.

That's what this promise is about: McCain is laying out in public the truth that the Republican Party will never accept any Democratic President as legitimate, no matter how many people vote for that Democrat, no matter how the Constitution requires them to at least respect the Office of the Presidency.

This is absolute partisanship. McCain and his fellow Republican Senators are kicking their Constitution duties into the dumpster. It won't matter if Hillary wins by three percent or double-digits. The Republicans in Congress will obstruct her for as long as they possibly can.

THIS is why I've been screaming for the last 8-10 years to never vote Republican. Doesn't matter the office, if it's Dog Catcher or State legislator or US Congress or the Senate or President. This is the attitude of the entire GOP: THEY must rule or else everything will be in ruins.

THIS is why it's just as important for people to get out the vote to kick every Republican out of every elected office. It's not just the Presidency at stake, America: EVERY office needs purging of obstructionist Republicans who WILL NOT DO THEIR JOBS.

Every Republican Senator up for election this cycle needs to lose. Every Republican Congresscritter up for election this 2016 needs to lose, to hell with their gerrymandered safe zones. If the GOP retains majority control of the Senate, we will never see ANY vacancy - not on the Courts, not in the Cabinet - filled as required by the Constitution. If the GOP retains majority control of the House, we will never see ANY sane federal budget and will likely see series of government shutdowns by a Far Right Congress insisting on their godless tax cuts for the super-rich.

You wanna know why government's not working? JUST LISTEN TO THE REPUBLICANS. They will tell you: THEY DON'T WANT IT TO WORK. They would rather let it rust away, block every fix, block every qualified candidate. They would rather let the nation suffer for their self-serving needs than compromise or do their jobs.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican. They sure as hell have not earned your vote.

When Beltway Media Is Out of the Loop

There is something tangible to the "what the hell happened" response of the mainstream media this week, all involving the combined fascination and fear the media elites have with Teh Trumpster.

After the Republican leaders and most of the Washington DC power circles attacked Trump for going after one of their beloved own - Senator McCain - the prognosticators and experts and talking heads were crowing that Trump had finally gone too far, had insulted a hero POW, was likely to lose supporters from the vast number of Vietnam War vets and other vets who leaned Republicans.

Instead, Trump's polling numbers have stayed well in the 20 percentile - give or take a few points - and remains in a clear lead among the Republican primary candidates.  We're all - guilty party here alongside the Beltway media elites - talking Trump (even as we're all in the need for bathing in holy water once we walk away from the blog writing).

The media probably couldn't understand why, although I kinda figured Trump wasn't going to get hurt at all by going after McCain.  Because he wasn't so much going after John McCain the Vietnam Navy pilot, he was going after John McCain the Media Darling.

Look, back in the day before the Republican Party got to be too insane even for me, I backed McCain, I liked him as a candidate in 2000 mostly because he wasn't Dubya (by that time my ire for the Bush clan due to Jeb was greater than anything else) and partly because he showed bipartisan efforts as a Senator.  Problem with him now is, I swear McCain gets invited to Sunday talk shows every week.  He's become a go-to interview subject for the mainstay political roundtables to where he's over-saturated the market.  They - the media elite - hang on his every word even when he's not the real guy they ought to be interviewing on that given topic.  They act like he really won the Presidency in 2008 or something.  It's gotten annoying, even to a former fanboy like me who will on occasion forgive McCain for the sad-but-unavoidable pandering he did to win the GOP nomination back then (I do, in fact, absolve him of making the horrific move of picking Palin for the Veep spot: he wanted someone the party wouldn't take, so he went either out of spite or frustration for a complete unknown whose governing record wasn't deep enough to reveal how much of a loon she was.  I blame a poor vetting system and a party obsessed with image over competency...).  Anyhoo.

THAT is the guy - the Interview All-Hours-Of-The-Day McCain - Trump was really targeting: Trump was pointing out how McCain's reputation was vastly inflated all because of his years in a POW camp.  And most of the Trump fanbase knew that.  A good amount of the Republican voting base knew that: it may surprise the media elites to know that McCain is not all that popular to the Tea Party and Far Right crowds.

It's amazing how an entire profession - media people, whose backgrounds are supposed to be in journalism and are supposed to handle information and data on a regular basis - can be so clueless, out-of-touch, and misinformed about a lot of things about their own nation, their own audiences.

I'm amazed but not surprised.  I've known for over a decade that the higher-end of the media power structure - the national media, the cable and nightly newspeople - have been disconnected from the general public ever since the Lewinsky scandal.  How the talking heads were all predicting doom for Bill Clinton, that he had to resign for having betrayed everyone (mostly themselves), the moral indignity of it all (swoon)...  Only to find a majority of Americans still liked Slick Willie, that they backed him during the Republicans' failed effort to impeach, and that all of their outrage had been mocked or ignored.

The disconnect is still there, and it's gotten worse.  Per David Atkins at Washington Monthly:

The interesting question is why there is such a disconnect between the establishment pundit class and average American voters.  ...The professional political class lives in same socially rarefied air as America’s business...elites, culturally and economically separated by a widening gulf of inequality and disconnection that prevents them from grasping at an emotional, fundamental level the challenges faced by normal families...

The low-end journalists, the ones working local markets and on papers and magazines (the ones not yet dying out) may still earn within the real middle-class range (between 40k to 70k yearly) and may well remain connected to the real world.  However, once you get to the cable channel level, the nightly news level, the talking head level, those are people pulling down the seven-figure incomes and book deals of the upper classes.  Even the ones still "thinking" themselves as liberals/left-leaning are going to find themselves unable to fathom what a family living under $10 an hour has to do to survive.

The professional political class tends to believe that there is a mythical American “centrist/moderate” voter who loves John McCain and Joe Lieberman because they are serious, respectable moderates who “get things done...”

Note: we don't.

...The fact that the centrist voter is largely a myth doesn’t dawn on them, because they spend more time misreading poll results than they do actually talking to average voters. (Hint: lumping progressive and conservative voters who call themselves “independent” together into a single voting bloc and then marveling at their seemingly moderate collective policy choices isn’t terribly smart statistical analysis.) In a Washington DC where John McCain is a permanent fixture of the talk show circuit, McCain is the “maverick” and bellwether of serious opinion. In the real world, John McCain is just another extremist Republican to Democrats, and a despised Establishmentarian to the Republican base.

The media elites don't grok that McCain might not get all the fans agiggling because they meet with him so often and interact with his circle of friends to where they are blind to how others outside that circle would view him.  Epistemic closure at its simplest.

And by the by, moderate voters DO exist, we just don't sit there going Ooh and Ahh at everything you all say on the cable shows and Sunday morning gush-fests.

In the elite pundit world, voters are fairly happy with American society generally but unhappy with Washington specifically because of an “extremist” environment where no one cooperates to pass respectable centrist legislation. But in the real world, voters understand that the middle class is coming apart at the seams—which leads more knowledgeable left-leaning voters to support economic populist approaches to reduce inequality and hold corporations accountable, and that leads less educated, more racist and reactionary conservative voters to try to restrict immigration from allowing others to take “their” jobs...

To the media elites, those views both Left and Right are considered 'extremes' mostly because they can't see themselves being on the wrong side of income inequality (it's not their fault they're rich, after all) that's driving those views in the first place.  It's far easier to sit in their hermetically-sealed studios sharing coffee and jokes with "experts" like themselves and joke that it's all "Washington's fault" without realizing their part of that Washington culture - hi, Morning Joe! - making it a mess.

Easier for them to sit on the sidelines wondering where all the good times under Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill went than it is to empathize with the growing evidence that the United States has fallen apart and needs serious reforms and fixes - to our tax codes, to our highway budgets, to our immigration system, to our drug war and incarceration policies, to our racial conflicts and growing body count - that just can't be bothered with because they would involve messy disagreements among their own.

I said it before: it's not that we need term limits on our elected leaders, we need term limits on the Talking Heads dominating the cable news shows.  We need to slap some journalistic sense - and journalistic ethical standards - into these vapid chatterers, and remind them there's a real world outside the Green Rooms.

Three Reasons I Will Not Vote for McCain

My anger expressed in the last post toward McCain's blatantly false complaint about Obama's use of a common phrase is basically my emotional, gut-level urge to see McCain fail this November. But I feel it is my duty to give at least a few practical reasons why I refuse to vote for McCain:

1. Obama's going to be better for me on tax cuts. Both parties have tax plans on their platforms, and Obama's is better than McCain's covering my tax bracket: Obama's offering to give me 5 to 6 percent off while McCain is offering 1 to 3 percent. Just check the graph.
   The Tax Policy Center that provided info for that graph has done the review on the two tax plans, and has found Obama's plan is better for the lower- and middle-income classes.
2. If McCain does indeed win in November, I have to posit: WHERE will he get his candidates to fill key positions in his administration? WHO will make up his Cabinet, his Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Education, Attorney General? Answer: McCain will fill his Cabinet with people from the Bush Administration. Where else is he going to find people from his party with *any* level of experience in an executive work setting? McCain says he'll put Democrats in his Cabinet, but odds are he's only going with one, his old buddy Lieberman (possibly for State). Everyone else is going to end up coming from a Bush the Lesser administration that has been filled from bottom-up with borderline quacks, unqualified hacks, and cronyist crooks (caveat: current Sec. of Defense Gates has shown some skills, but he was pretty much forced on a Bush team suffering from the 2006 setbacks and political pressure worried about the worsening Iraq occupation). If Obama wins, yes he'll probably add people from the last Democratic admin - the Clintons. But review the Clinton years: other than Housing Secretary Cisneros, what other problems were there with other appointees? Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy went to trial, yes, but that trial was a sham and he was acquitted on all charges. And I'm not going to focus on the conspiracy talks about Commerce Secretary Brown... The biggest scandals with the Clinton White House involved the Clintons themselves, rarely their Cabinet or other appointees. Between the Republican talent pool and the Democratic talent pool, I'll take the Dems to fill the next White House jobs, please!!!
3. Simply put, McCain is going to continue wars. He's doing too much saber-rattling at Russia and Iran, and not convincing me he's going to do anything about lessening our troop presence in Iraq nor resolving the disaster Afghanistan (and Pakistan) has become.

Those are just three legit reasons I can't vote for McCain. My passionate emotional reason for not voting McCain (HE'S TURNED INTO A GODDAMN LIAR) is the trump card, naturally.

The point where McCain lost me

Edit from seven years later:

whatever image this was, it's lost.

I will fit something else here to pass the time.

This is another moment where McCain burned a bridge: where he told Letterman he had to race back to DC for a budget crisis, only for Dave to find out that McCain actually went to the news studio to sit in for another interview.  People don't like to get blown off like that, Senator...