My take: While I recognize and respect Sen. McCain’s military service to our country, I haven’t approved of his stances as a politician. It’s still sad to hear this, both for the man and his family. #FuckCancer.
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Explains some of his recent behavior.
I agree that his stances are not my own, but I appreciate his service to this country, and that he I think has represented his own constituents well.
I was wondering how someone at 80 does with a major surgery like this.
Hope it is successful and returns to health quickly.
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yeah, exactly. i respect him because of his literal lifetime of service to our country, but i loathe his politics. that being said, i’m sad to hear about his brain cancer. nobody should have to go through that. i wish him and his family well.
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If more politicians on the right were like him, I could deal with that. At least he seems like he’s not a total delusional psychopath, and more like an adult with a different point of view.
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EXACTLY. i was going to go off on a tangent trying to express this, but decided not to. but yeah: he’s an old-school republican, and at least i can understand that they just come from just a different point of view. he’s like my husband’s parents, who feel so lost now and don’t understand what happened to the party they were part of most of their lives. they (and he) aren’t delusional party-liners, willing to burn down the entire country just to tally a win.
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Bombing Vietnam is nothing to be proud of, but nobody should have to deal with brain cancer.
###Who should get brain cancer?
- everybody
- somebody
- nobody
0 voters
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He was an adult with a different point of view. Lately he’s been a partisan hack. Reactionary, but nowhere near like Trump.
How does McConnell rank? Paul Ryan?
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Once you’re over 75 I think you deserve something of a free pass in these matters. Especially if you’ve probably spent much of your adult life on painkillers. But also I think people over 75 should not be in politics. Heck, I’m almost a decade from that and I feel I’ve got enough brain fossilisation that I should stay out of politics.
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On the bright side, US health care for senators is among the best in the world, and no senator need fear that medical payments will leave their family bankrupt.
On the brighter side, his condition meant he was unavailable to vote for the Republican health care bill, so McConnell could not get it passed. The FSM moves in mysterious ways…
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62-year-old McCain who ran against Bush was an adult with a different point of view. He was the type of “moderate” Republican that we had back then.
71-year-old McCain who ran against Obama was another Republican partisan hack like the rest. He would have been a continuation of Bush, not a more moderate alternative.
Also, keep in mind that Bush wasn’t considered super conservative in 2000, because the more fascist and theocratic elements of the party were around back then, but were on the fringe. By 2008, Bush had stampeded rightward, and there were no more moderate Republicans left. McCain was certainly no longer one of them.
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I had a casual friend in the neighborhood who over the course of 5-7 years seemed a little bit more “off” than before but otherwise OK, and then in a matter of months she was diagnosed and had died of brain cancer. I know I’m not the only one who looked back at various behaviors noticed and shrugged off at the time and realized they were probably symptoms.
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McCain has glioblastoma, which is a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer.
His behavior over the past few months has been very off, but I don’t think he’s had glioblastoma for much longer than a few months. He has had cancer before, but this is unrelated.
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Ah, that’s a good point. No excuse, then!
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His words haven’t lined up with his voting record in about 15 years. He’s survived things no one should have to, but it was time to retire sometime before voting for endless war in 2003.
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Oh, I’m with you on that. I’m just saying that he at least was at one time someone that I respected as having a different viewpoint from my own, who represented his constituents well. Lately, he’s been totally ineffective.
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The people in the US that I knew at the time fell into two camps; those on the Republican side who thought he shared some of Clinton’s “loveability”, and my Dem friends in NY who were already convinced he would be an utter fustercluck. “Risen without trace” is the expression - how do you get to be POTUS with such a solid record of failure at everything?
(Mind you there’s the example of Putin; but there’s evidence that he was more or less told he was going to be President because he was seen as the least corrupt man in the Kremlin. Was Bush told he was going to be President because the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney were so utterly unelectable and he would be their front man? Unfortunately unlike Putin he didn’t have filing cabinets full of the goods on the people who hoped to control him.)
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Bush was Governor of Texas and was the assumed heir apparent since after the 1996 election. It’s not that he had no experience, he had some. There were older, more qualified candidates, like McCain, but I think the Republicans were tired of running the likes of Bush Sr and Bob Dole and losing to Clinton. I think they wanted to run a Republican Clinton, and Bush Jr fit the bill.
Also, he didn’t look like nearly the failure that he was because of family connections. He went to Old Money schools because he was Old Money. He started businesses because he had the financial backing to do so (again, Old Money), and if he failed, it was just win-some-lose-some as far as the general public was concerned. He ran his daddy’s campaign because it was his daddy’s campaign. If he were just some guy, he’d be lucky to find a job managing a car wash.
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From Oz, the reaction to Bush Jr was pretty much “they couldn’t possibly elect someone that blatantly unfit for the job, could they? Oh, wait, they have. This is going to be catastrophic”.
We’ve learned better since then. Trump’s rise was disappointing but not overly surprising.
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What a walking bag of contradictions. Having just benefited from high-quality, state-subsidized healthcare, he swoops into Washington to take high-quality, state-subsidized healthcare away from other people. Then, having just voted to proceed with a bill that didn’t go through the regular order or committee process, he’s gives a speech about the necessity of returning to regular order.
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Some behavior is just not excusable, regardless of “war hero” status or brain cancer.
If 11 million people lose their coverage because of the GOP’s hate-on for Obama, McCain is really just another murderer.
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