John McCain has apparently decided that “brave truth teller” is going to be a more fun and rewarding role for him than his “fall in line as a good Republican for Trump” position of 2016 and the first half of 2017. Accepting an award at the National Constitution Center Monday night, McCain didn’t say Trump’s name, but if he’d been a teenage boy he would have been doing a Trump/Bannon version of the loser sneeze. Instead, he went with “half-baked, spurious nationalism” and “unpatriotic”:
“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” McCain said to applause in the crowd, “is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”
“We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t,” McCain went on to warn.
It’s hard to see how McCain redeems himself fully from his past complicity as a good Republican for Trump, but let’s hope he keeps trying.
Tuesday, Oct 17, 2017 · 4:12:33 PM +00:00
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Laura Clawson
Trump understood (or saw someone explain on TV) what McCain was talking about:
Trump said in a radio interview with WMAL in Washington that “people have to be careful because at some point I fight back.” The president added “I’m being very, very nice but at some point I fight back and it won’t be pretty.”
McCain’s answer a short time later was simply: “I have faced tougher adversaries.”