A Tale of Two Mavericks
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from
Ari)
The word "maverick" is as
diluted and overused in politics as the word "slugger" is in Major
League Baseball. As with the game's legendary sluggers who are mostly dead, the
rest retired or ignored into irrelevance, so go political mavericks who are
always eager to distance themselves from the always reviled and suspect
political power structure that they nonetheless yearn to join.
Among those of his generation and
subsequent ones, the late Senator John McCain perhaps came the closest to
earning the sobriquet "maverick", a noun bandied about a decade ago
with wearisome frequency and often laughed at by progressives who never tired
of noting the fact that McCain voted with the Bush administration over 80% of
the time. Yet, others of more analytical mindsets were quick to point out it
was not how often McCain voted with the Bush administration but when he didn't.
Bush couldn't wait to squander the
$230 billion surplus left behind by the neoliberal Bill Clinton and his first
year in office couldn't wait to hand it out like Halloween candy to his
"Haves and Have Mores." John McCain voted against it. He voted
against the 2003 tax cut followup that Bush then called for although both Nay
votes were in losing causes. And then, in the ultimate maverick move, one of
the last votes ever cast by the senior Arizona senator was another Nay vote at
the end of a seemingly endless succession of Senate votes to repeal Obamacare.
McCain walked out of the Senate cloak room while Mitch McConnell stood near the
well of the Senate floor, his tortoise face creased in a smile anticipating
victory at last, while Ohio's Sherrod Brown nudged a Democratic colleague as
if to say, "Watch this!"
Then, in a move bringing to mind a
Roman emperor's live or die gesture made famous by the movies, McCain flattened
his hand to get the clerk's attention then quickly turned his wrist, his thumb
down, thereby saving the ACA and the provision his fellow Republicans so
desperately wished to repeal: the pre-existing condition penalties that had
made the HMOs billions. Only the applause of Elizabeth Warren and Dianne
Feinstein could drown out the sound of Mitch McConnell's black little heart
breaking as he bowed his head in defeat for the 50th plus time.
Therefore, it was a shame that the
senator who was already slowly dying of a rare form of brain cancer, the one
that had claimed Ted Kennedy's life nine years ago, cast as his final vote a
Yea for Trump's ruinous $1.4 trillion tax cut for the wealthy. Ted Williams, a
true slugger and maverick who always stubbornly hit into the shift, went out
with a home run in his final at bat. John McCain grounded into an
inning-killing double play that benefited just the owners.
There were other not so proud
moments in McCain's career, such as being the lone Republican caught up in the Keating
Five scandal that was just part of the Savings and Loan crisis of
1989. For those of you too young or too old to remember, that was the scandal
engineered by Arizona financier Charles Keating, who'd brazenly said, "One question, among many
raised in recent weeks, had to do with whether my financial support in any way
influenced several political figures to take up my cause. I want to say in the
most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."
It wasn't the kind of quote one would
wish to attach to the resume of a "maverick."
The Other Maverick
And then there was him.
Long before John McCain began his
lengthy political career, indeed at a time when his survival from one day to
the next at the Hanoi Hilton wasn't even assured, Donald John Trump was at real
Hiltons porking one woman after another. Prior to this time, in the late
50s-early 60s, Trump just playacted playing McCain's role in his tin soldier
academy. As you can see from the Academy's yearbook, Trump enjoyed quite an
active athletic life before being 4-F'd out because of "bone spurs."
So he never got a free tour of North Vietnam that John McCain had after his
plane was shot down.
While McCain was recuperating from
a botched operation by North Vietnamese quacks, having bones broken, being
starved and made to live in filth, Donald Trump was having unprotected sex and
living the typical playboy life of a coddled millionaire scion who had
everything handed to him. Years later while he made his own bid for president,
Trump had the gall to say that having unsafe sex was his own "personal
Vietnam", a phrase that didn't get past McCain.
Trump was also billed as a
maverick, a so-called breath of fresh air in a swamp supposedly created by the
sitting president Barack Obama. Trump was the straight-shooting,
tell-it-like-it-is political outsider beloved of ignorant voters since the days of Huey Long, the
man without a filter. He'd even infamously said of John McCain, "The only
reason he's a war hero is because he was captured, alright? I like people that
weren't captured."
Despite that grave insult to a man
who'd endured five years of torture at the hands of our enemy, Donald Trump
still expected and demanded McCain's endorsement. McCain reluctantly gave it
then, in a true maverick move, withdrew his endorsement of Trump. Trump, a man
not renowned for forgiving and forgetting slights, never forgave McCain's about
face and waged war on him to the bitter end.
McCain mainly took the high road,
preferring not to engage Trump directly like his colleague, the junior and
outgoing Arizona senator Jeff Flake. While John McCain earned both his Purple
Hearts, as well as the Flying Cross, three Bronze Star Medals, two Navy and Marine
Corps Commendation Medals, and the Prisoner of War Medal, Donald Trump had his Purple Heart given to him, one that was
earned by a seriously misguided Iraq veteran. Trump even callously said,
"Man, that’s like big stuff. I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This
was much easier.”
John McCain was also quick to spot
a slight, especially one given to the military and Donald Trump never deprived
him of ammunition. During the transition, the "president-elect"
insulted his top generals, disregarded their advice and recklessly got US service
members as well as civilians killed in poorly thought out raids. He insulted a
grieving widow whose husband was killed in one such raid in Yemen and whose
dismembered body she was about to claim at the airport by saying. "He knew what he signed up for." He then
proceeded to insult the family's congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, for revealing the contents of
the phone call.
Then there was Trump's running feud with the Khan family, who'd
lost a son in Iraq, because Mr. Khan had publicly criticized Trump at the 2016
Democratic National Convention. It goes without saying that, too, didn't get
past John McCain. And one can reasonably assume all these grave, unforgivable
insults to the US military and their families were swirling through the
senator's mind as he contemplated the virtually unprecedented act of
withdrawing a presidential endorsement.
Will the real maverick please get out of bed?
That
brings us back to Donald John Trump, the latest "maverick" to slouch
his way through the Beltway. Trump was a maverick in that he didn't wish to
shove his family before him like other politicians and wouldbes. In fact,
evidence of the softer side of Trump with his family had long since been thrown out and rediscovered in a thrift shop.
With this nauseating treasure trove of photographs, there
are now on the internet countless pictures of Donald Trump in bed (a surprising number
not featuring Ivanka) and there are none of John McCain in a similarly
recumbent position. And his slothful tendencies have, unsurprisingly, made
their way to the White House which Trump had once called "a dump."
There's nothing like a maverick in
Trump, who has done or tried to do everything a Republican president is
expected to do- Cut taxes for the wealthy, deport immigrants, roll back
environmental regulations, bloat the military's budget. In short, bankrupt,
pollute and make whiter a country that is inevitably turning multicultural. But
Trump doesn't stop at that.
Regardless of the number of his
detractors, Trump had proven for years that, like a martial arts master in a
Run Run Shaw kung fu B movie, he will take on all comers either singly or
simultaneously. To Trump, the only sacred cow is Trump himself. He will not be
insulted, he will not be slighted and he will certainly not be investigated by
the federal government. And he will insult anyone and everyone, whether they be
former presidents, political opponents, sitting Congressmen and Senators, even
grieving war families.
A decade ago, while on the
presidential campaign trail in his own quest for the presidency, McCain spoke
to a woman who said she didn't trust Obama because she believed he was a
Muslim, McCain immediately shook his head, snatched the microphone out of her
hand, and defended his own opponent, saying he was "a
decent family man". It was a small breath of fresh air in a typically
raucous campaign rife with the usual mud-slingers, dead-catters and piano wire
artists.
Compare that to Trump's dangerously
provocative mantra of "Lock her up!" and seemingly forgetting about the
due process that he even now enjoys as the focal point of a 15 month-long
federal probe. John McCain, despite his well-known fiery temper, never once
exhorted his followers to beat up dissenters in the audience and wistfully
talking about the good old days when cops beat up protesters.
When Senator McCain passed away in
Sedona Arizona last evening, word eventually filtered back to his former North
Vietnamese captor, whom the senator had last seen nine years ago during a tour
of the Hanoi Hilton in which he was tortured for five years. He expressed sadness at the Senator's passing and
Col. Trần Trọng Duyệt had this to say:
At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance. Later on, when he became a U.S. Senator, he and Senator John Kerry greatly contributed to promote Việtnam-U.S. relations so I was very fond of him. When I learnt about his death early this morning, I feel very sad. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think it’s the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Việtnam-U.S. relations.
Compare that to Trump's generic Hallmark
condolences on Twitter that were then recycled on Instagram and featuring,
unsurprisingly, a picture of himself.
While John
McCain may have been an imperfect maverick at best, the man still knew where to
draw that crucial line between the decent and indecent. It is that invisible,
often hard to see line in the heat of political campaigns in a nation in which
politics is a blood sport, that often determines the character, or the lack
thereof, of a candidate, and John McCain could see that line without
squinting.
Donald
Trump squints at everyone and sees "a traitor" in John McCain while calling
convicted felon Paul Manafort "a brave man."
posted by jurassicpork @ Sunday, August 26, 2018
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