Digby is right — this clip (starting at the five minute mark) is the best way to remember McCain at his best. It’s also a reminder that, even if one thinks, as I do, that Trump is just the GOP showing its true colors, there are certain ways in which the GOP didn’t used to be as bad as it is today.
Reader Interactions
64Comments
Comments are closed.
guachi
It’s true colors. It’s. It’s. It’s. It’s. It’s.
No.
lamh36
Notice Chump’s statement came out AFTER PBOs…so you KNOW Chump will HATE that
Doug!
@guachi:
Thanks
Major Major Major Major
He wasn’t the man he wanted to seem like—in the end he wasn’t even the man he wanted to be—but I’m fine with a moment of rare sincerity right now. RIP
eemom
Oh for fuck’s sake. YOU of all people are gonna jump on the hagiography bandwagon??
I can think of exactly 3 good things this man ever did: (1) during the 2008 campaign, shut down a crazy old twat who said Obama was an “Arab”; (2) gave a gracious concession speech; (3) voted against the destruction of Obamacare last year.
The Fucking End.
Doug!
@eemom:
I’m not a huge fan myself but I was struck by that clip in terms of how hard it would be to imagine Trump saying something like that.
eemom
@Major Major Major Major:
Why? Why is it right that the perpetrators of evil get a break when they die, when their victims never do?
eemom
@Doug!:
wow, talk about a low bar.
suzanne
While thinking about McCain over the last couple of days, I am reminded about the slander that Karl Rove spread regarding McCain’s daughter Bridget during the 2000 campaign. Karl Rove should never forget that. I hope he feels crushing regret until his dying day.
Major Major Major Major
@eemom:
I try to give everybody a break when they die.
eemom
@Major Major Major Major:
You ignored the second part of my question.
eemom
@suzanne:
Oh yes, that’s the worst thing Karl Rove ever did.
You people amaze me.
lamh36
Definitely my thoughts on this.
Major Major Major Major
@eemom: no I didn’t.
Patricia Kayden
That speech was beautiful. Never saw it before. I do recall McCain being pretty gracious about President Obama’s election during his concession speech. He certainly was less boorish and entitled than Romney.
suzanne
@eemom: Jesus Christ, lady, put down the bottle.
eemom
@Major Major Major Major:
ok then. Go search out the millions of victims of the policies McCain voted for and do some posts about them.
Major Major Major Major
@eemom: c’mon I just did a post about genocide victims, it’s not my entire beat.
eemom
@suzanne:
GFY, twerp.
I am sincerely disgusted by this bullshit.
Luthe
I would argue McCain’s introduction of Sarah Palin to the national stage hastened the GOP’s descent into lunacy and paved the way for the Fart Cloud.
Major Major Major Major
@Luthe: completely agree.
Starfish
@eemom: He threw a good barbecue with tire swings for journalists that have him excellent press coverage.
Amir Khalid
@eemom:
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
eemom
@Amir Khalid:
ok then, why don’t you get started on some bonum for Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, etc.
Gelfling 545
Something that to me sets McCain apart from the current crop of Republicans is that he believed in a system and working within it. Was willing to engage, not always but often, with the “other side” to constructive purpose. Now burn it all down is the GOP style. I think we will find his passing is a loss to us as well.
Gelfling 545
@Luthe: I think it did but I have always been of the opinion that Palin was more or less foisted on him. I seem to recall talk at the time about him having other ideas or even at one point cutting her loose.
Omnes Ominbus
@eemom: You aren’t a very nice person,
Cheryl Rofer
I’m okay with remembering the good about a person just after their death. It tells me there is hope, that we can come together, that there is good in most of us. We can leave the balancing, the modifications to later. It doesn’t all have to be done tonight. Yes, there are some utterly evil people, but they are, fortunately, few. Let’s celebrate the good in John McCain’s life, just for tonight and maybe into tomorrow.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
If McCain was as bad as Stalin, what does that make Cheney and W? Because I hate those assholes way more than a self-important pisher like McCain.
Amir Khalid
@eemom:
I am advocating not obsequy but courtesy.
suzanne
“Even during bouts of drunken shitposting, she maintained remarkable consistency in her use of HTML tags.”
See, you can find something nice to say about anybody.
Emma
@eemom: Jesus H. Christ. Comparing McCain to those is like comparing the local pickpocket to Dillinger.
Gelfling 545
@Cheryl Rofer: And They’re blog comnents, not a history book. I hope at my passing people who know me will take a brief time to remember any good/kind/ funny things about me and save the scathing evaluation until the corpse is at least cold and I will accord the same to Sen McCain.
CHET MURTHY
It’s a decent, kind, generous, and lovely speech. I kept watching thru some of his word about Alfred Smith. And he talked about how Smith received an apostolic benediction from the Pope. It occurred to me that today, that passage sounds very, very different, than it sounded back then. Just 10yr ago, and even after some of the abuse scandals were getting public airing, the Catholic Church wasn’t getting the well-deserved …. bollocking that it’s getting today.
The times sure have changed.
tobie
@Gelfling 545: Al Franken mentioned in his statement that he and McCain tried to pass legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs. I think that’s what you mean by working within the system. McCain-Feingold is another good example of this. The law banning torture in 2015 was not solely McCain’s initiative but he played an important role in it. I can’t think of a single Republican who would sponsor/co-sponsor legislation like this today.
cmorenc
@suzanne:
The only sort of thing Karl Rove regrets is how much of a fool Megyn Kelley made of him over his complete disbelief that even Fox’s election-stat experts had just projected that Obama had defeated Romney. Well, he also regets that Obama beat Romney. Point is, Rove only regrets when he loses or realizes he’s had his ass handed to him.
eemom
@Omnes Ominbus:
Sorry to hear that, Ominbus. Speaking of putting down the bottle.
You people really are idiots. Of course I wasn’t comparing McCain to the monsters of history. I was just reacting to Amir’s aphorism about speaking well of the dead.
eemom
Site fucked up. Those emphases weren’t mine. Except “Ominbus”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
are you performing some kind of act for your own amusement?
suzanne
……I take back what I said about proper use of HTML tags during drunken shitposting.
randy khan
I don’t honestly know how I feel about McCain. He was a lot more complicated than many politicians. In general he hewed the Republican line, but he had those moments – the ACA vote, McCain-Feingold (more than a moment, as it took a long time to get it through), his remarkable graciousness toward Obama in 2008 – that made you think he was capable of much more. And maybe that’s his real epitaph, that he sometimes escaped the bonds of orthodoxy, but not nearly often enough.
eemom
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @suzanne:
Knock yourselves out. Here it is in proper format.
More specifically, any self-professed liberal or progressive who eulogizes John McCain is, at best, an idiot.
Have a good evening.
OldDave
@eemom:
Something, or someone, certainly is. Give it fucking rest, ok?
Ruckus
@suzanne:
LOL
That’s twice tonight you’ve gotten me to.
Look I get why some are apoplectic about any refuckingpublican. Really for my entire life they have been lying, cheating, thieving assholes, who want to eat babies and kill old people. OK the old people without money or a bible but still. But he was the opposition, not Stalin. Now that doesn’t apply to a lot/most of the current ones who also may not be Stalin but sure seem to be trying to be.
suzanne
@Ruckus: It is entirely possible to recognize that McCain was deeply flawed and problematic while also honoring the good that he did in his life and hoping that he left this life without enduring more suffering. I think that on the literal day of his death that we could concentrate a bit more heavily on the latter.
Ruckus
@suzanne:
I humbly suggest that you go to the obit thread and read my comments. Especially towards the end. I’d bet you’ll find that we agree 100%. We have the rest of our lives to discuss his shortcomings, we can at least give him this one day.
Now please don’t ask me for the same consideration on the demise of the shitgibbon. Because that’s one person I’ll refuse to honor, for any reason or cause.
suzanne
@Ruckus:
110% agreement. I will get as drunk as someone else is right now and then vomit on his grave, if I get the opportunity.
She is really the period shits of this blog……comes on periodically but with very little notice and just stinks up the place entirely. Sigh.
Jay
@Gelfling 545:
Nope, http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/08/mccain
If he “believed in the system” you would have Sontayor and Goreish (sp) as supremes.
I understand eemom’s anger.
suzanne
@Jay: He voted for Ginsburg and Breyer. The man was very much the definition of a mixed bag, no doubt.
Jay
@suzanne:
Some people are tired of “going high”, given how low the Rethugs are going.
Some people are afraid that “bipartizanship” will return as it has so many times in the past in which the Democratic ideals will get continually screwed over again.
There’s a lot of fear, loathing, anger and defeatism on the Center Left and sometimes, it spills out.
Ruckus
@suzanne:
Vomiting! That’s almost disgusting enough!
Not starting drinking again but you know, just one to celebrate the occasion……..
Jay
@suzanne:
And he joined Yurtle the Turtle’s blocking of Obama’s appointee’s and vowed to block Hillary Clinton of ever getting a Supreme on the bench.
In a long career of Public Service he did maybe as many a 5 “good things”, He used every trick in the book to kill 500 “good things”.
He was a bog standard ReThug from 2 years ago. In only 2 years that level has become a high standard few of the surviving ReThugs of that era, can clear.
That’s quite a slide in only two years.
But you know, Hitler doesn’t get enough credit for being the one to kill Hitler.
McCain won’t have that problem.
suzanne
@Jay: Don’t fool yourself that her tantrum had anything to do with principle. She drops in from time to time to tell everyone how stupid they are, then crawls back to her cave. Or, more likely, the bar.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jay: if saying rude thing about John McCain would get the Dems congressional majorities, I’d crap on him all day long
Jay
@suzanne:
From Digby:
“Forty-four percent of Republicans surveyed in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday hold a negative view of McCain, while only 35 percent have a positive view of him. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Democrats surveyed now see him in a positive light.”
I’ve had positive interactions with eemom, I’ve also seen her explode. Sometimes, venting that anger is cathartic, there’s a lot of it out there.
What’s that old line?
Oh yeah, ” I come not to praise Ceasar, I come to bury him.”
Jay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yup, there would be a very long line,……..
But McCain’s going to have thousands of hailographies published in the coming months, and very little actual history.
Saint McCain will have an MSM shrine erected.
eemom
@suzanne:
That would be you, sweetie.
suzanne
@eemom: I don’t smoke weed, or use any other drug. I have joked about it because I joke about most things, but I don’t do it, nor do I expect you to understand what a joke is.
I would recommend that you go hide in a closet and sober up.
eemom
@suzanne:
uh huh.
suzanne
@eemom: I responded to you in the other thread. God.
J R in WV
@suzanne:
nope. Brother Karl Rove is a complete total sociopath, with no other humans in his ticy nasty little world. So no, he has no regrets, other than not becoming President himself. Which is John’s fault, and W Bush’s fault, and Obama’s fault of course. Not Karl’s fault, that’s how these things work, after all.
J R in WV
@suzanne:
And to think I took her out of my pie filter just the other day, too. That was so silly!
Ella in New Mexico
@suzanne: Wow. The obsession it takes to go back and find a year and a half-old response (barely making her point, by the way) . that you made is pretty God-damn creepy. Looks like you hit a nerve there.
mapaghimagsik
I can understand the anger all too well. He may not be the shitgibbon, but that’s a low, low bar. He did some honorable things, and time will give no one a perfect score.
But I won’t venerate him. Democracy has paid a pretty high price for his silence.