John McCain's death seized in the latest opportunity to attack Trump and subject the public to globalist propaganda

I knew John McCain was a well-known and highly regarded figure in Washington but the scale of the response to his death has exceeded any of my expectations.

Ultimately, the media generally liked John McCain because he was a Republican that often broke with his party to side with the Democrats on popular liberal issues, and they loved him under the Trump Administration because he was one of the most prominent Republican critics of Donald Trump. Their wall-to-wall coverage of his passing and the reaction to it in Washington is hagiography and not in any way helpful to really understanding what John McCain stood for and what it says about Donald Trump.

McCain was known throughout his political career as a "maverick". This because he would often break with his Republican Party colleagues and reach across the aisle to work with Democrats – some examples of which include his longtime efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, being a steadfast voice against the use of torture, and most recently his vote to block the Trump Administration's repeal of Obamacare. McCain had been a particularly prominent critic of Donald Trump, repeatedly sparring with him on things like his perceived softness on Russia and his handling of the Khizr Khan Gold Star family controversy.

There are a lot of people who dislike and disagree with Donald Trump and the Republican Party and McCain's willingness to break with them may come across as a good thing. John McCain though was a lifelong Republican, not a Democrat. He repeatedly ran for and won elections on Republican positions only to betray his voters when in office. He was perfectly free to have run as a Democrat if he wanted to. The bigger problem though is that despite all the op-eds and media coverage saying otherwise, what John McCain represented wasn't all that admirable in the first place.

Possibly one of John McCain's most enduring traits was his being an unrepentant warmonger. McCain was a supporter of the Iraq War to the very end, a major proponent of arming the Syrian opposition (with little regard for the risks of helping jihadists directly/indirectly and without any idea of what/whom would replace Assad), and a longtime agitator against Iran. He was such a prolific advocate of war that the sheer array of countries he wanted to attack is something to behold on its own.

Now in all fairness, in reading about his background I did find that McCain wasn't completely consistent in this across his entire political career. One exception I found was his vote during the Reagan presidency against involving US forces in the Lebanese Civil War. At the time McCain offered the sagely advice that the deployment of American troops overseas was only justified if the situation met several conditions, including that "there must be a reasonable expectation of success" and "there must be a clear U.S. national interest at stake." Regardless of what his politics were before though at some point it seems that he shifted definitively into the more pro-war positions he's known for today.

What may be more surprising to people, given the number of friends he had, the bipartisan praise he's received, and the common contrast of his character with Donald Trump, McCain wasn't that impressive of a person in the first place.

John McCain was born into a family of high-ranking military personnel – both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals in the Navy (the highest possible rank) and his father John S. McCain Jr., as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command, was commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1972. He followed in his family's footsteps by joining the Navy but unlike the illustrious careers of his father and grandfather the young McCain did not fair well to start. At the Naval Academy he was a notoriously poor and disobedient student, graduating 894 of 899 in his class, and as a Naval Aviator in training he crashed two planes and had another incident involving power lines with a third. It's been alleged by people close to him that he was pushed through training only because of his connections to his powerful father.

McCain's treatment of women leaves much to be desired too. While he was being held captive as a POW his first wife, Carol McCain, was injured in a serious car accident back home. She required surgery that had the effect of shortening her by several inches and that left her with a pronounced limp for life. The two got back together following his release from North Vietnam but McCain would soon leave her to marry up with Cindy McCain, the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune. His ex-wife was an extraordinarily understanding woman and continued to support him but she freely acknowledged that he was "making up for lost time," chasing younger and more beautiful women.

Perhaps most controversially, even his recognition as a hero, on account of his handling of his time as a POW, is more questionable than often said. McCain no doubt suffered greatly during the years he spent in captivity and experienced torture like all the other prisoners, but there's little reason to believe he did anything exceptional beyond what was expected of all POWs. One of the most popular stories about him, that he was offered early release but refused, leaves out that it came with conditions that were considered unacceptable and were rejected by many other captives as well. Further, as related by the legendarily tough pilot John Dramesi who was held captive alongside him, McCain was broken by torture just like many of the others. That may be an unfair point of criticism, given what they went through, but McCain's story should be told accurately nevertheless.

Nobody's a saint and it's not to suggest that McCain's shortcomings are comparable to Trump's but it does reveal some of the hypocrisy and bias in media coverage between the two men.

* * *

John McCain's death was something of a trap for Trump from the beginning, given the history and animosity between them, and Trump has certainly found himself ensnared by it. Trump's handling of his death has been met with one outrage after another. First it came out that he had spiked a statement his administration had put together calling John McCain a hero, instead choosing to release just a personal tribute to him on his Instagram account. Then, with flags still at half-mast at the Capitol building the White House put its flag back up less than two days in. After that there was more outrage when Trump was reported to have gone golfing on the same day of McCain's funeral – a funeral that he was expressly uninvited to. It didn't matter that the Trump administration was directly following the letter of the flag code that says that for members of Congress flags are to be lowered on the day of the death plus one additional day. John McCain was planned something of an extended hero's funeral, being a rare politician to lie in state in the Capitol Building (only the 31st person to be bestowed that honor) and afforded a funeral with a who's who of past presidents and other powerful people in Washington, and Trump's perfunctory messages of condolence were fodder for much outrage.

Much of the backlash against Trump has been grossly unfair. By refusing to invite him to his funeral and choosing to slam him in a statement from beyond the grave it was Trump that was the victim of an attack. Trump's opponents in the media and in politics clearly saw this as an opportunity to exploit to pressure him on his America First policies. Trump no doubt saw this and it's quite understandable that he wouldn't want to play along.

It's obvious too that the media's not being entirely sincere in all of this. Helpfully for us, John McCain ran for president in 2008 against Obama and many of the same accusations of racism and bigotry we hear so much now were levied against the relatively tame McCain then. One of the things I find most irritating is how the Vietnam War, which the left has a long, proud history of opposition to, has been increasingly exploited to attack Trump by mocking his avoidance of service (on account of a supposed bone spur condition) in comparison with John McCain's storied war experience. Given that the left has always seen the Vietnam War as an unjust one that well deserved its mass protests and conscientious objectors it seems sometimes they'll use just about anything to attack Trump.

Note that the intent here is not to pile on a recently deceased man. It's always unseemly to criticize people who've passed away because they can no longer defend themselves. One positive thing I can say about John McCain is that he did seem to have something of a genuine moral compass on issues like torture, owing to his personal experience with it. He was a conflicting character at least. But politicians are more than just their character, what matters most is the role they play in the wider world of politics. While John McCain may have been seen positively by the media and the left as an opponent of Trump's, there are many of us on the other side who view McCain and those like him as being representative of the old guard of conservative politics, too focused on geopolitical contests on the other side of the globe and not near interested enough in the well-being of the American nation. To people like us McCain's passing isn't so much a loss but an opening to advance the nationalist politics we need today.