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."