Besides John McCain’s problems of granting amnesty to illegal aliens and restricting freedom of speech, he is severely deficient in the areas of national security and integrity.
Politics is the art of compromise and leadership is the art of principle. Lincoln used superb political skills to implement some of the most cogent and insightful principles to guide this nation. McCain has used political skills to implement compromises consistent with increasing personal acclaim among liberal media and politicians. The former is dead and the latter is alive, but dead to principles unrelated to his immediate personal advancement.
John McCain lacks leadership for the War on Terror. His leadership codified the Army interrogation manual making terrorists legal combatants. His leadership granted terrorists American citizenship rights under Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. He thereby ensures information vital to defeat terrorists remains sacred and unobtainable. Terrorists are unresponsive to direct questioning and psychological gambits. Therefore, interrogators need all stress and coercion techniques our military encounters in survival schools. McCain embraces liberal orthodoxy considering those methods torture, but his searing experiences call forth contrary insights he must suppress.
McCain especially understands from the Geneva Conventions terrorists are not insurgents or freedom fighters; when captured, certainly not prisoners of war. They are not armed forces, militias, or volunteer corps of any country or authority. These killers are not members of organized resistance movements carrying arms openly. They have no distinctive identifier. Terrorists cannot even qualify as spies or saboteurs destroying infrastructure required to support military operations.
McCain understands Geneva Conventions intended to isolate such forces, provide them no protections, and allow destruction with any overwhelming furies needed to crush their abominations. Knowing these factors he promised to close Guantanamo Bay, inviting terrorists into our legal system. He decided to accommodate extraordinarily savage behavior, which checkmates national laws intended to manage simple murder and kidnapping, and renders Posse Comitatus a crumbling deception.
McCain especially appreciates from our Constitution that laws guaranteeing civil liberties presuppose operation within an invincible society. He more than most understands Alexander Hamilton’s words that devastating, unforeseeable perils must lead deliberations. The Federal government’s three branches primary responsibility is to pursue Hamilton’s admonition that powers exist without limitation; providing capabilities thwarting dangers as well as repelling attacks. McCain understands powerful warfare capabilities require potent intelligence acquisition and exploitation before and throughout campaigns.
The framers of our Constitution and the Geneva Conventions held powerful positions throughout the darkest times of our country and the world. They were our Founding Fathers, and parents and grandparents of the Greatest Generation. Their words expressed durable morality earned in our fight for freedom, and against the ultimate bloody deluge of the 20th century. These first generations expressed principles derived from confronting shattering tragedies, and earning peace through victory.
John McCain’s actions are particularly reprehensible because he turns a blind eye to the council of these people. McCain continually seeks popular advancement by placating those coveting luxurious, asymmetrical morality requiring shelter from perilous choices and danger awareness. His crime is repudiating military and intelligence professionals facing hard choices when confronting shrewd, ruthless enemies obscured behind frightening uncertainties.
Instead he follows the success of Bill Clinton, who cemented in politics for both parties the idea that character did not matter. There are no principles, but only ideas that secure possession of an office. John McCain is the most prominent Republican example of this new direction towards possession of power through careful exploitation of perceived expediency.
John McCain succumbed to the terrible addiction of political power. The same addiction expressed itself differently in fellow Navy officer Randy Cunningham, who was the Navy’s first Vietnam ace. Over the decades the honor and moral authority of both were gradually traded away for influence in the political arena.
To me McCain is like a cadaver prepared for viewing. The removal of blood and organs equates to the trading away of honor and moral authority. The reputation that remains is like the cosmetics applied for viewing the corpse at the funeral. It is easy for anyone to get onto the same sort of gently downward sloping path. The final result is tragic, but we should not suffer such pathetic and contemptible modern day Macbeths or Hamlets as Republicans in the Senate.
The closest analogy I can find is piracy.
A post worth reading more than once. Excellent.
Damn good post. That about sums up my attitudes about the guy, as well as adding a few aspects I wasn’t aware of.