by Denis A. Conroy for the Saker blog
If institutions exist to provide continuity and permanence, subjectivity is the glue used to personalize narratives in ways that enable compliance vis-a-vis myth, to prosper at someone else’s expense.
A moving message, a personal tribute to America and its people was read to the public by Rick Davis, a close friend of McCain’s…who recently passed away… and his national campaign manager in the Arizona Republican 2008 and 2000 presidential campaign.
Speaking of country’s best qualities, McCain wrote that “we weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all corners of the globe.”
“We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.” Davis, holding back tears, said as he read McCain’s message in Phoenix.
“Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here,” McCain wrote.”Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history. We make history”, he wrote.
Which begs the question; is this a coda marking the beginning of the end for old white Anglo folk who never quit trying to promote the greatness of their lilly-white pedigree? Will McCain be remembered as a patriot intoning American greatness in matters of military supremacy?
Adept in juxtaposing an unhealthy reverence for war, war, and more war with heavy doses of phlegmatic gruel, he had this to say, “when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been,” the image of a crusty old stalwart wrapped in the stars and stripes immediately leaps out from the looking glass reflecting the the United States of Solipsism.
Is he just another cog in the American aerial machine of war that subjected the civilians of Vietnam to a reign of terror from the skies, dropping agent orange and napalm on them because America felt it had a right to dictate who could and couldn’t do something in a global marketplace it considered its own?
For how long will myths associated with narratives of the ‘exceptional’ kind, uttered here by John McCain, remain palatable to an American public who were led to believe that America, and America alone, had the right to control the rules of the game? Achieving security by using methods that sow resentment and hatred and violence in all corners of the globe is anachronistic to a tee, but clearly illustrate what America is best at doing, “We never hide from history. We make history.” can only be read as pure Hollywood gobbledygook.
McCain’s insistence on identifying with subject matter that contended America’s right of passage…”to be the great force for change they have always been”…perfectly illustrates the American public’s inability to realize that these subjective utterances exist in their present form because they evolved from within a culture that measures objectivity in terms of what it manufactures for made-in-America projections of self. Goods, and their availability became America’s Achilles Heel system, when the spoils of trickle-down largesse were used to keep the public mind captive to propaganda, and safely detached from mindfulness.
So, the view from outside America becomes a very different one to the one from within. For example, McCain penned a farewell message before he died that appears to take thinly veiled shots at President Trump for fanning the flames of “tribal rivalries” and hiding “behind walls.” But from without, these words come across as merely the typical blustering that keeps the subjective spirit of America on tenterhooks. What is recognised in all of this, is the fact that reportage of data has become the mainstay of American media…both established and alternative…forever postponing the Pogo moment that would entail facing up to the truth, “we have met the enemy and he is us”, as Walt Kelly so succinctly observed.
The rhetorical drama of American politics is alive and well, one side snooping on the other, digging up dirt, but nothing really ever changes. The unequivacable level of violence that accompanies American Foreign Policy causes hardly a ripple in the national psyche. Failing to create an effective anti-war movement, the nation continues to unconscionably strut the danse macabre while the world bleeds. Instead of action, epistemological America repeatedly returns to look at itself in the solipsistic mirror, to more completely bask in a glory that is the complement of self-adoration.
And so, McCain likes to keep doing it again and again…with much of the American public looking into the looking-glass along with him…hoping to evoke images of themselves as heroes to be admired, and be reminded of the work that God’s own people can do. The people of the “we make history” kind, chose to domesticate the ‘warring tribes’ of the world so they might bring them into the American neo-colonial fold. Submit to our will and we shall show them the way forward, being the sub text. Make them believe that civilisation is something that comes into being when the state possesses the hardware to control individual expression, while telling them that they are lucky to be living in a democracy.
But, like most Americans who peer into the recesses of the American looking-glass, the strangest thing to behold is the existence of un-American entities on the radar who fly flags that are not the stars-and-stripes. This causes consternation, as unknowns knowns are subjects that cause much disquiet to a nation that has yet to emerge from its pig-in-a-poke unilateralism. The fact that China, Russia, Iran and other countries possess the status of independent nations, automatically triggers hostility.
Because of the seemingly oblique way in which China, Russia, Iran and others is misunderstood in matters relating to military culture, the McCain/American playbook must inevitably vilify them as being weak because they don’t demonstrate their power in ways that America does. They are inevitably portrayed as the ones who hide from history, because they lack the aggression to colonize their neighbours. America makes history by bombing the crap out of the Muslim world, encircling China with military bases, and shoving NATO forces into Russia’s backyard believing they have the blessing of their peace-god…which leaves one wondering what an angry god might look like.
But man cannot live by bread alone…or live by technology alone. We are innately equipped with dual dynamics that enable us to understand the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. However, somewhere along the evolutionary path, a fork in the road was reached when so-called educated people decided to take the fork out of the human experience by introducing institutional means to tell us what was right, and what was wrong for human kind.
But as each fork in the road is unique, it would be the height of stupidity to imagine that the decision making process…problem solving…should only involve a clique who had the authority to act on behalf of the many.
When the fork in the road experience was relegated to the realm of the institutional…the power of the church, military, royalty, the psychiatric industry etc. took over to advance the cause of the proto-institutional hybrid epistemologists who would eventually become the shit-talkers who would make it to Congress, the Media, the Pulpit, the Government and to the shop floor. This was the beginning of a process designed to dumb down the voice of the people.
So now we are once again at a fork in the road, surrounded by nuclear stockpiling, garbled newscasts, religious fundamentalism, land despoilation, and an atavistic Halloween forever celebrating the status of authority by way of fending off challenges to the status quo,as occurred on 5th November 1605 in the time of Guy Fawkes.
So, in replaying the tensions between individual expression and the elected parliament, criticism can be construed in ways that suggest that an anti-war movement is nothing more than an event that’s existed in the past, that remembers the actions of the guy who’s anti the guy who’s anti-Parliament, and that everything is futile. Which leaves us all the more confused as genocide and mayhem have become parts of the status quo, and we have lost the means to deal with it. Somewhere along the evolutionary line, ‘the cat got our tongue’ and we lost our voices. To make things worse, the ‘fork in the road’ was removed from public perception when government purloined the decision-making process.
But beyond America’s borders there is zilch enthusiasm for the sort of hubris that defines the ambitions associated with the exploits of the Empire builders. It is technology that beguiles the one-dimensional people who plays the neo-colonial game.The belief that the Empire is empowered by virtue of possessing ballistic missiles enabling it to rule the world is pure myth. The fork in the road may be atomized, but innate responses to reality can never be put out to pasture.
If McCain’s dying words merely reflect the endemic spite that exists in American society…to the detriment of the more unsavory aspects of his life experiences…then we need to seriously think about the degree to which that society remains myopically caught up in its misguided understanding of history. ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all’, is an accolade associated with navel gazing and Sen. McCain was good at it. So, when Sen. John McCain’s final lament was delivered, there were no surprises. His words were ritualistic, as were the epaulettes and medals that connected him to old guard of republicanism via love of America the great…right or wrong.
To my mind, the flags that are now flying at half-mast in Washington flutter in a culture of hubris where halitosis became the scent that now pervades the historic record. McCain, the man who wrote;”do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here” are indubitably the words of a deluded individual. McCain could not grasp that greatness could not exist in a culture that lacked moral courage. He was unaware of the fact, that without moral courage, the body politic would inevitably shrivel.
Strange that it mattered so little to him that he was one of those who went to Vietnam to interfere in somebody else’s civil war, targeting men, women and children from one end of the country to another with napalm, agent-orange and other egregious substances. He was not one to lament the hurt he inflicted on simple people…millions of them… who were trying to make their own history. This indifference to pain inflicted on civilians across the globe had become the American way, but why?
He believed that only America could make history. On every score it would seem, America has been in a dark delusory place these many years. By ignoring the realities in the world beyond their borders, Americans found themselves consigned to a world where their better selves were deemed redundant. Would the last conscionable individual to leave America please switch the lights off on his or her way out…
Denis A. Conroy is a freelance writer from Australia
Excellent writing. My question always was. Was he a fake or real. How much did he disclose while in the little dugout out pits in North Vietnam. Was it the real reason for his hatred towards the “lesser species” that subjected him to the humiliation. If I am not mistaken, he was shot down more than once over the Vietnam (needless to say by Soviet missiles). Amazingly, the missiles were made by the “Gas Station” pretending to be a country, which “Oh my God” humiliated this coward beyond our understanding.
McCain was treated so much better than the other POWs because the Vietnamese knew who his father was right away (whether McCain told them or someone else they knew in the first few days).
They thought he was like royalty and they sent their best surgeon to fix his broken bones (which were broken when he ejected not by any torture or beaten). He is said to have injured his arms so badly because he held them in an incorrect position when he ejected and not as pilots are trained to do. His right arm was broken in 3 parts, his left in one and he broke one leg.
He parachuted into a lake and the Vietnamese rescued him (there is even a photo of this.)
He was in a hospital sleeping 20 hours a day when he was recovering from all his injuries.
There’s no evidence he was tortured. He doesn’t have any scars nor any other breaks from those which happened when he ejected and went into the lake.
He was in the middle of the USS Forrestal disaster months before and likely he released a bomb which made it worse. He fled from his plane so fast and got under deck and didn’t stay on deck to fight the fires like the other pilots did. McCain was uninjured from that. He helicoptered out with a reporter (and no evidence he was given permission for that) and was drinking Scotch in Saigon while the wake for the dead of the Forrestal took place.
Even during the Forrestal disaster the reporter who came sought McCain out because he knew he was the son of a 4-star Admiral. McCain was a media darling because of who his father was.
I’m not sure this is clear yet. Mc Cain believed, since liberal democracy was the greatest system ever invented, and since US America was the only country founded on it, that US forces have the right to go anywhere and do anything they feel like. Vassal states of different make-up could be permitted, but all had to take orders from the city on the hill.
Liberal Democracy is the problem. Some of our libertarian friends, for example, think they have the right to crush Venezuela because, they say, “it’s socialist.” The truth is, they feel they have the right because they feel they do. The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of the latest urge.
McCain, son of Cain, dead. The idea of doing what pleases . . . goes on.
We should all be grieving at John McCain’s passing. Seriously. Because he was such an grossly incompetent enemy that he was actually a friend. – read another Dimitry’s master peace:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-senator-masquerading-as-gas-station.html
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. My own view encapsulated in this short exchange from a Syrian perspective:
Where is McStain’s grave? I want to go there and piss on it.
I would join you except that I hate standing in a long line.
I don’t know but I can tell you where Marx’s grave is (I pissed on it once – not so much on purpose I just happened to be there and had to pee). Highgate Cemetery in North London
There has always been, in nooks and crannies, in redoubts and enclaves, and in valleys and hollows, an America which is not that of John McCain’s. His America is an abstraction. It is a creedal entity, a propositional thing. It is not a union, a republic or even a nation. It is an aggregate of would-be Promethean selves which are actually, however, alienated, estranged and shriveled selves held in check by the Hobbesian state which is an abstract corporation with a monopoly on coercion, with the authority to determine the limits of its own power and with the force of a powerful will, be that will one of a dictator, an oligarchy, a bureaucratic nomenklatura, finance and military cadres or even a “democratic” majority. This collective of shriveled selves held in check by the Hobbesian state believes itself to an exceptional entity and indispensable presence among men. McCain’s America is the America which would remake us all – including those of that other America – into its image, usurping the work of God himself. “These people” of McCain’s America seem to actually wake up of a morning scheming as to how to make others over in their image, whether those others be Americans of a different ilk or Syrians or Russians.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis knew the enemy in 1862 as he addressed the Mississippi legislature in December of that year:
“Our enemies are a traditionless and a homeless race; from the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace of the world. Gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the North of Ireland and of England, they commenced by disturbing the peace of their own country; they disturbed Holland, to which they fled, and they disturbed England on their return. They persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America. Having been hurried into a war with a people so devoid of every mark of civilization you have no doubt wondered that I have not carried out the policy, which I had intended should be our policy, of fighting our battles on the fields of the enemy instead of suffering him to fight them on ours.”
Confederate General Robert E. Lee stated the following to Lord Action after the War:
“…whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”
That is McCain’s America an abstraction which is aggressive abroad and despotic at home.
It is not my America, but there are few of us left who cherish kith and kin and home and hearth and who do not wish to make others over into our image.
Robert; An excellent post. Orlov taught me to distinguish between the real America and the fact that capitalism consciously constructed an anti-America in response to the 1781 defeat of Cornwallis. What you write about so well is actually the “anti-America” established by the Anglo-Zionist empire over the living corpse of the real America between 1800 and the 1950’s. It was all quite deliberate. In a slow deliberate master stroke the Anglo-Zionist empire secretly reconquered America. Now we all live in an empire of alienated ego. The point being that America’s collective self image is controlled and manipulated by imperial forces who have one overriding propaganda aim. That is to convince the American people that their own alien construct, the imperial state, is actually the real America. So John McCain’s America is in reality the Satanic anti-America in masquerade. It would need to be for him to support it. However it appears to me that the empire is in the process of forcing the American people to acknowledge that the movie Star Wars is real. The death star assembles. And here we all are in desperate need of the living power of the real America.
I do am not inclined to see a sliver lining where there is none; yet, things are moving in Middle Earth among the deplorables, the Hobbits and the Old Narnias. The fact that there is movement gives a modicum of hope.
“Our enemies are a traditionless and a homeless race”
Calling the Jewish Mafia traditionless is sloppy thinking and a widely held but fatal misunderstanding. And the Mafia’s home, by the way, is the high sea, maritime law, the law of piracy, where the brute takes all and the naive is left standing, mumbling, “But, but, but in kindergarten I was told about freedom & democracy …” Time to wake up, brothers and sisters!
Too long and tedious, but essentially is correct in its assessment: stupid combination of political correctness with messianic ideology is deadly.
Who was McCain ? In the Naval Academy he was one of the worst students, being placed near the bottom of the list in achievement. During basic training he destroyed three combat aircraft and two more in combat. He almost sunk his own aircraft carrier, killing and injuring more than 100 American sailors. The North Vietnamese shot him down. In POW camp he had special treatment, as his father was an admiral. His conduct as a POW was anything but honorable.
After Vietnam he turned to politics, being nothing more than a stooge for the neocons in the US. Photographs of him and ISIS commanders can be seen on the Internet.
McCain deserves to be remembered, but in the negative context. He is the true personification of your average American politician, bought and controlled by the neocons in the US.
I almost never speak of the dead in a negative way, generally I just say nothing at the passing of pure evil, but since I read both west and Russian news daily, I could not help but notice the passing of what to the MSM was a hero of gigantic proportions, and to the rest of us, read the vast majority, a RINO who was not quite so grand.
Dr. NG Maroudas made mention in his posting that he would with pleasure void his bladder on the final resting place of this spawn of The Dark Lord. I would never post such a statement, and regarding our dearly departed, I would honor his life of service and bravery by pouring a bottle of fine Kentucky Bourbon on his grave. The fact that I would strain the bourbon through my kidneys is a detail of minor proportions.
Perhaps Wet Start John is reading what we, and I, write about him, so in my signature I’ll leave a little something to alleviate his hopefully long and not so enjoyable stay in the Kingdom of the Dark Lord.
Auslander
Author
Just for you, Wet Start. Enjoy.
Sevastopol, The Third Defense. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079KRPLS4 Book 1, A Premonition, The Move South. Set against a backdrop of real events and real places, the reader is left to filter fact from fiction.
An Incident On Simonka https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ERKH3IU NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.
Here’s to the pint of bourbon! Auslander.
There has a been more than a few mentions that the SAM missile that brought him down over NAM was aimed by a Russian adviser to the Viet.
Perhaps he knew and that was the reason for his hatred of Russians.
But, using that logic, think of of the 197 families that lost their member on the deck of the Forrestal.
They were slain by McCain’s notable incompetence.
Truly, the world would have been better off if the Vietnamese hadn’t rescued him from the lake’s waters he plummeted to. He spent the entirety of all his days from that moment stewed in evil intentions toward millions of innocents, a significant number of whom perished because of his malevolence.
But I shan’t speak badly of him . . .
I doubt that his hatred of Russians was based on the reason you mentioned. I tend to think that his problem (or tragedy if you want) was his sergeant mind wrapped in ambitions of a general.
“His support for pro-Israel, anti-Russian American foreign policy was zealous, verging on fanatical. This explains part of that puzzle”
https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/john-mccains-family-ties-jewish-organized-crime-syndicates-arizona/ri24574
And…Ross Perot said of McCain ‘s divorce, “After he came home, he walked with a limp, she( wife) walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona and the rest is history.”
McCain’s wife had been in a car accident. Crushed pelvis and legs. Many operations. She refused to let the doctors and family tell him she was in that horrible situation. She did not want to worry him while he was not in the US. He dumped her very soon after he returned to the US.
What a contrast between McCain and Smedley Butler. McCain learned nothing from war, Butler everything about it. Perhaps because McCain flew an aircraft 20,000 feet above the dead and dying; Butler was in the thick of it on the ground. McCain was still fantasizing about American exceptionalism; Butler proclaimed war as a racket. He stated that our wars turned his Marines into racketeers for capitalism, into hit-men for the mega corporations. McCain served in Congress and adopted the hawkish new-con (and neo-lib) line of regime change. The establishment closed the book on Butler the moment he died. His message was anathema to them and to all the McCains among them. The Declaration of Independence was a revolutionary beacon, but not America which quickly assumed a pro-colonial stance. It became just another global bully that picked on the weak, the poor, the huddled masses and exploited them. Butler recognized it, McCain never did. Butler reverted back to his Quaker beginnings. He opposed getting involved in other people’s wars unless America was directly attacked. He died shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor rendered the subject closed. McCain was born after WW2 ended. One can only speculate on what his stance would have been if he were active before the attack. Would he have joined the American Firsters of those days and Charles Lindbergh as an admirer of Hitler? In 1941, the nation was divided and anti-semitism was not a seminal issue to most. A reluctant starter, once in it FDR committed America to total victory and unconditional surrender of its enemies. The hard core American fascists never accepted FDR’s decision and waited until the war was over before renewing the thrust toward Empire expansion. McCain pursued that course in his public life.
@Bill Goldman: “Would he have joined the American Firsters of those days and Charles Lindbergh as an admirer of Hitler?”
Quite the contrary, I read somewhere on the web that General Smedley Butler refused to join a coup against FDR by top U$ Nazi sympathisers. I forget the names of the conspirators but they were among the Leading Dynasties in the U$ establishment. Smedley Butler revealed their names to FDR and was disappointed when Roosevelt neglected to punish them.
Dr. Maroudas – If you read carefully, you will see that my question of backing the American Firsters i’d 1941 and Charles Lindbergh, one of their followers, was directed at McCain, not Butler. As for the Wall Street plot to overthrow FDR, a Congressional investigation led to a report confirming Butler’s charges but as you wrote nothing was done about it because too many rich and important people were involved. As I wrote, Butler opposed American getting involved in foreign entanglements and going to war unless we were directly attacked. McCain, on the other hand, continuously encouraged false flag actions to get us into war. He was a dangerous, mixed up dude.
A true American hero, that is the Cancer/Tumor that took the life of McCain.
“If the paeans to McCain by diverse political climbers seems detached from reality, it’s because they reflect the elite view of U.S. military interventions as a chess game, with the millions killed by unprovoked aggression mere statistics, says Max Blumenthal.”
The Other Side of John McCain
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50136.htm
It’s pretty clear now that military industrial complex which is not much more than military Keynesian economic policy fighting against horrors of Great Depression ended American greatness. The ideology of Anerica before that was to stay out of European confrontation, wars and that mess up. But when wild west was conquerred capitalists couldn’t just relax. Greediness is the thing.
McCain was unique. Perhaps only person keep on warmongering after been several years POW. He was not really a human would J.Lydon alias J.Rotten of Sex Pistols have said.
Russian Wave (Русская Волна)
John McCain: Farewell Russians, I’m no more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvHg6VWqfvw
You can change the video’s subtitles to English
Correction – Farewell to the Russians, I’m no more!
The words “Wave” and “Farewell” remind me of the songs
Amur Waves – Амурские волны
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3v169QYN0E
Farewell of Slavianka – Прощание славянки
(Slavianka means in English Slavic woman)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mOyrfqAJZc
Both songs in Russian
I was thinking about the death of John McCain and was reminded of the oration of Mark Antony, in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, which I read while attending Boston Latin School back in the day. It goes like this:
Speech: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(from Julius Caesar, spoken by Marc Antony)
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
I would revise this for McCain.
“I come to bury McCain not to praise him….
The evil men do lives after them….so let it be with McCain.
Noble Trump hath told you McCain was no hero, if so, it was a grievous fault, and Trump is an honorable man. So are all our socalled leaders, who praise McCain, all honorable men.
McCain brought the spoils of war home to Lockheed Martin and his corporate plunderers. Did that make McCain ambitious? When the corporations cried, McCain hath wept.
Oh judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin of the millions dead McCain
Is responsible for.
And I must pause till it come back to me.
The Jimmy Dore Show
Whitewashing McCain’s Warmorgering By Journalists & Celebrites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60
Craziest Eulogy of John McCain comes From Democrat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA
MTTM TMMT’s comment: McCain’s brain tumor should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize
True Military Record of John McCain (Written by an Active Marine – see note at bottom)
McCain has never really earned anything. He is from a wealth pampered background and not fit to lead this nation.
A “war hero” doesn’t finish 894th out of 899 and still get stationed at a Navy champagne unit and promoted ahead of all but two of his 898 other classmates.
A “war hero” doesn’t crash three U.S. Navy jets out of sheer incompetence and ineptitude, including two during non-combat training sessions.
A “war hero” doesn’t get written up on drunk-and-disorderly, fraternization, disobeying orders, and insubordination charges more than two dozen times in less than three years.
A “war hero” doesn’t get promoted to squadron commander of the air field named after his own grandfather immediately after crashing his third airplane.
A “war hero” doesn’t have all the military records that cover his time in Vietnam and all disciplinary actions against him censored and sealed “as a matter of national security.”
A “war hero” doesn’t get 28 medals awarded all after-the-fact “for bravery” for no other reason than being shot down and captured and then go on a celebrity public relations tour because he’s the son of two acclaimed Navy admirals.
A “war hero” doesn’t repeatedly cheat on the wife who’s back in the states waiting for him, and then cheat on her more when he returns to the states, and then divorce and abandon her.
A “war hero” doesn’t systematically vote against every single pay and benefit increase for military and veterans throughout his entire political career, all the while claiming to be “the soldier’s Congressman,” and then take credit for the passage of a G.I. benefits bill he that voted AGAINST.
A “war hero” McCain III lost jet number one in 1958 when he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay while practicing landings. He was knocked unconscious by the impact coming to as the plane settled to the bottom. McCain’s second crash occurred while he was deployed in the Mediterranean. “Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula,” Timberg wrote, “he took out some power lines [reminiscent of the 1998 incident in which a Marine Corps jet sliced through the cables of a gondola at an Italian ski resort, killing 20] which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral.”
McCain’s third crash occurred when he was returning from flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game. Timberg reported that McCain radioed, “I’ve got a flameout” and went through standard relight procedures three times before ejecting at one thousand feet. McCain landed on a deserted beach moments before the plane slammed into a clump of trees. McCain’s fifth loss happened during his 23rd mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967, when McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. McCain ejected from the plane breaking both arms and a leg in the process and subsequently parachuted into Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi.
For 23 combat missions (an estimated 20 hours over enemy territory), the U.S. Navy awarded McCain a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals. “McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat,” explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon. “Since McCain got 28 medals,” Bell continues, “that equals out to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat. There were infantry grunts on the ground who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I’m sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison
The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down.” For years, McCain has been an unchecked master at manipulating an overly friendly and biased news media. The former POW turned Congressman, turned U.S. Senator, has managed to gloss over his failures as a pilot by exaggerating his military service and lying about his feats of heroism. McCain has sprouted a halo and wings to become America’s POW-hero presidential candidate.
September 3, 2008
NOTE: Author unknown but is known to the person who submitted this to the Federal Observer.
Do your own research if in doubt.
The man helping to carry McCain’s body in his casket is western choice for replacing Putin: Vladimir Kara-Murza
You left out his behavior during the USS Forrestal disaster – his most caddish of all:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/investigating-john-mccains-tragedy-at-sea/