Thank you, John McCain

I think this man deserves more than a footnote in a silly celebrity death thread. You don’t have to agree with his politics to agree that this man’s service to and love for this country was second to none. A life of honor and bravery we don’t see much of, especially right now. Rest In Peace, Senator and thank you for all your sacrifices.


American hero.   


May he Rest in Peace.


Could there be a more unflattering mirror to hold up to the idiot in chief.


sbenois said:
American hero.   


May he Rest in Peace.

 +1


conandrob240 said:
I think this man deserves more than a footnote in a silly celebrity death thread. You don’t have to agree with his politics to agree that this man’s service to and love for this country was second to none. A life of honor and bravery we don’t see much of, especially right now. Rest In Peace, Senator and thank you for all your sacrifices.

 He definitely does. I couldn't think of which category to use, as it was a politics free weekend so I placed him there.



as someone who was less than impressed with McCain's policies, I just read the following remarkable account of his time as a POW.

This is a description of a real hero.


You probably already know what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi, Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home – movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90-degrees to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton,” of much movie fame – where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant’s office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain’s father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true – both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused, The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? It so, would you have refused to go? You simply can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you’d react.
But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he’s capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest



In the best meaning of the word........"He served"


Does anyone have Russ Feingold'sarticle from the New York Times?


what do you mean “have it”?


You do not have to agree with his politics, but he was not afraid to speak (and vote) according to his personal beliefs.  His one big mistake was unfortunately a lady named Sarah Palin.

At the time, I spent a lot of time in Louisiana.  My colleagues there refused to vote for McCain, as he was 'not conservative enough' (read: 'racist enough').



I, as a veteran, am not going to thank McCain for his service. There are many things that he was wrong about.

This just scratches the surface.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/john-mccain-fake-maverick-horrible-record/

A true war hero is Hugh Thompson who helped end the My Lai massacre.


No one is perfect.  As exemplified by your petty post. ^^

The country lost a great man with his passing and I see few on either side of the aisle capable of filling his shoes.


Like most of us he was a mixture of good and bad. Sarah Palin was his greatest mistake. Voting against repeal of ACA a saving grace.

I started to say "Like all of us " but I have yet to see a thread of good in he who shall not be named.


I think the time for a full accounting of John McCain's life will come at a later time.  At this moment, I think it's enough to extend condolences to his family, recognize his courage as a POW, and acknowledge that McCain most likely was quite sincere in believing that the policies he pursued were in the best interests of the country.


I'm sorry, but all the talk of his heroism and other fine qualities are really misplaced. The guy was a hot tempered, womanizing, spoiled child who got where he was mainly through well placed family connections. Let's not re-write history - it sickens me to hear the likes of Schumer sing his praises. Here is a good summary of his life, written in 2008: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/john-mccain-make-believe-maverick-202004/


Factotum said:
The guy was a hot tempered, womanizing, spoiled child who got where he was mainly through well placed family connections. 

As the son of a leading Admiral, he was offered early release from captivity as a POW.  He refused it.

I will argue against his politics until the cows come home but I don't know if I could have refused that offer after years of beatings and torture. Could you, or would you have taken advantage of your "family connections"?


Klinker said:


Factotum said:
The guy was a hot tempered, womanizing, spoiled child who got where he was mainly through well placed family connections. 
As the son of a leading Admiral, he was offered early release from captivity as a POW.  He refused it.
I will argue against his politics until the cows come home but I don't know if I could have refused that offer after years of beatings and torture. Could you, or would you have taken advantage of your "family connections"?

 From the RS article that I cite above:

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military’s Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. “Many of us were given this offer,” according to Butler, McCain’s classmate who was also taken prisoner. “It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”


Jamie, please delete this thread. People are truly disgusting.


conandrob240 said:
Jamie, please delete this thread. People are truly disgusting.

" I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'

Hall on Voltaire


sbenois said:
American hero.   


May he Rest in Peace.

 +10


conandrob240 said:
Jamie, please delete this thread. People are truly disgusting.

 Please don't delete this thread. Discussion has been civil - please point out what is disgusting. 


it was intended to be a memorial thread to honor someone. If you don’t see what is disgusting about posting nasty things about a man in a memorial thread, you are beyond hope. If you wanted to disparage the man and pick apart his wrongdoings, by all means do so. Maybe just not at the guy’s funeral, no? 



conandrob240 said:
it was intended to be a memorial thread to honor someone. If you don’t see what is disgusting about posting nasty things about a man in a memorial thread, you are beyond hope. If you wanted to disparage the man and pick apart his wrongdoings, by all means do so. Maybe just not at the guy’s funeral, no? 


 Sorry that confronting the facts about his life are such a problem for you, but he is a public figure and I don't see how any of us benefit from a hagiography. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post about this at the time of Margaret Thatcher's passing:   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette


Factotum said:


Klinker said:

Factotum said:
The guy was a hot tempered, womanizing, spoiled child who got where he was mainly through well placed family connections. 
As the son of a leading Admiral, he was offered early release from captivity as a POW.  He refused it.
I will argue against his politics until the cows come home but I don't know if I could have refused that offer after years of beatings and torture. Could you, or would you have taken advantage of your "family connections"?
 From the RS article that I cite above:
What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military’s Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. “Many of us were given this offer,” according to Butler, McCain’s classmate who was also taken prisoner. “It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”

 Have you ever taken a beating? I don't mean a punch to the head or a kick in the kidneys but a real, live, lying on the sidewalk getting kicked in the gut and groin beating?

"McCain says his torture began in August of 1968. “For the next four days, I was beaten every two or three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked,” he said according to U.S. News. The North Vietnamese wanted a confession for crimes committed against the North Vietnamese people. After holding out for four days, McCain, at the point of suicide, agreed to write a confession. Looking back on his decision, McCain reflected “I felt just terrible about it… Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine,” he said, according to the report."

In any case, as noted above, McCain did make disloyal statements, as did most of the men who suffered the same sort of torture, as, I have no doubt, you and I would have if we had suffered the same treatment.  It was AFTER that confession that he spent another 4 years in POW camps, refusing early release.

You can say that his actions do not make him a hero but, in doing so, you are really telling us more about yourself than about John McCain.


I haven't posted anything negative about Sen. McCain here.  But I've had cable news on, and at this point the testimonials to him are absurdly over the top.  I think what you may be seeing from some other folks on this thread is a reaction to that.  I'm not inclined to post anything negative here in this thread, but there should be a forum somewhere to provide some balance to the propaganda-type coverage we're seeing from the Beltway pundits.


If folks want to start a thread about John McCain's politics, that would probably be a matter for the "All Politics" section which many of us have tuned out of.  This thread is in the Virtual Cafe  section.  My sense of the intent of that section is that while Virtual Cafe threads may touch on politics, they are not about politics.

I may be wrong, until recently, I never spent much time thinking about what the categories are really for.  That, however, is my impression.


Klinker: Since you feel so passionately about the victims of torture, I hope you are on-board with the prosecution of the likes of Gina Haspel, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. After all, "we tortured some folks"....


Factotum said:
Klinker: Since you feel so passionately about the victims of torture, I hope you are on-board with the prosecution of the likes of Gina Haspel, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. After all, "we tortured some folks"....

 Again, a matter for the politics forum, but yeah, actually I am.  If you are going to try to make me out as some sort of neocon apologist, I suggest you read a smattering of my posts on the political threads because you are probably barking up the wrong tree.

But that's ok.  We don't have to disagree about politics to simply disagree.


I believe that there is a time before someone is laid to rest where acknowledgement of service to country outweighs partisan attacks.  Thanks to ml1 for starting the other thread.


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