McCain and Palin
Much has been said about the contrast between the late John McCain – war veteran, bipartisan statesman, noble truth-teller – and a man who seemed way less likely to become president, Donald Trump.
But as the Arizona senator, like Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, spent his twilight years raging against the coarsening of civic life, he must have been aware that his legacy would include a decision that helped unleash the very forces he came to despise.
Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of McCain unveiling Sarah Palin, a say-anything, gun-toting political neophyte, as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election. It was an act of political desperation that left Washington aghast. It delivered a short-term boost in the polls. But it also opened the Pandora’s box of populism.
And it was an irresponsible, reckless, self-serving, destructive thing to do. “Noble truth-teller” my ass – Sarah Palin is his fault. It’s fine that he gave Trump some grief, but it doesn’t make him a noble truth-teller, or even a minimally responsible adult campaigner for the presidency.
“I don’t think he could have known it at the time but he took a disease that was running through the Republican party – anti-intellectualism, disrespect for facts – and he put it right at the centre of the party,” David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, told the recent HBO documentary John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Of course he could have known it at the time – why on earth not? It’s not as if the US has ever been shy about plunging full-tilt into anti-intellectualism and reverse snobbery.
An Alaska resident I follow had some nuanced thoughts on Palin which, while absolutely not absolving her of the manifold horrors of her character and of the collapse of the Republican notion of civics in the decade since her ascendance, gives some interesting perspective on whether or not she was the wellspring of all of the nastiness, or merely another symptom. https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1033545041929748480
(And apologies for the run-on; I’m reading more of the DFW article, and I’d forgotten just how allergic the man seemed to be to periods.)
Despite having intelligence that 80% of the Vietnamese people supported Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh army, US Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy favoured the most unheroic and antidemocratic minority side, leading to a war in which there were about 5 million Vietnamese killed overall, and probably about 15 million injured. So this issue of Trump vs McCain is a hard one.
Does one support Trump, the man McCain calls “Captain Bonespurs” for his Vietnam draft-avoidance on somewhat dubious and debateable medical grounds, or does one support McCain: the man who fought heroically for the totally rotten cause of the murderous neo-colonial puppet regime of the Saigon Mafia? You know, the war that killed about 10% of the then 38 million Vietnamese? And given the extra dimension that the said McCain got taken prisoner by the heroic fighters for Vietnamese independence, and endured all they inflicted on him as a captured enemy and fighter for Vietnamese neocolonial subjugation; while The Great Orange Pussygrabber was sitting out the war in his New York luxury penthouse and grabbing every passing pussy that took his fancy?
Philosophers and theologians could have a hard time sorting through all the issues in that, particularly if there was a diversion like some gripping drama on the TV, and they had at the same time fallen victim to an influenza plague, and their water pipes had all frozen and burst, and their prize poodles, Alsatians and Chihuahuas had all turned rabid and savage. Stuff like that.
While post-WW2 Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerrilla army was fighting the French colonialist bastards who had originally invaded Vietnam and overthrown its government in the 1860s, the US was aiding the French. To put that another way, the US either fought for Vietnamese colonial French subjugation, or for a US-cooked up puppet regime. (By which I mean that of Ngo Dinh Diem, whose little ways became a trifle more that the US could stand, and so good old JFK gave the green light for his assassination. Considerable irony in that, given subsequent events in Dallas, Texas.)
Like all colonialists, imperialists and invaders down through history, those French ones the US supported early on did not give a damn for Vietnamese democracy, and were dead-set against it, because they only had eyes for Vietnam’s resources, like it’s rubber and minerals. And McCain fought on the anti-democratic side in the murderous 10,000-day Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, and Trump perhaps unintentionally and incidentally, aided the cause cause of Vietnamese national liberation and democracy by avoiding the US draft and getting on with his more favoured activities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/19/donald-trump-john-mccain-vietnam-prisoner-of-war
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/casualty.html
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