And, right now, however ironic, that says a lot....

"honour" is not a word I would ever apply to him.

He certainly acted honorably in Vietnam.

I guess some here can only see black and white - no shades of grey.

I doubt many of us could’ve done the same.

We get it - you despise him.

Ever wonder why the other POW's named him "Songbird"? He was injured when his plane crashed and he did not follow instructions of keeping his arms and legs tight to his body. In a class of 899, he ranked 895. He crashed more than one plane, showing off. One time he flew through a valley in Italy, between two village, damaged the power lines, cutting off electricity from both villages. Any other pilot would have been court martialed. Johnny had his Daddy "fix" it, so he was not charged. His first wife was badly injured in a car accident while he was a POW. So as not to worry him, she never told him. When he returned, saw that she was no longer "perfect" he sought out other women, then he left. Reagan and Nancy paid many of her medical bills, since he would not. Not really an honorable person.

Using a filthy lie to smear a dying man?

www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-sen-john-mccain-a-hanoi-hilton-songbird/


A Fox News analyst was fired from the right-wing network in May 2018 after regurgitating a long-standing, long-debunked smear against Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and his experiences as a prisoner of war.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was terminated from Fox just one day after insulting the lawmaker for opposing the nomination of Gina Haspel to head the Central Intelligence Agency. McInerney told host Charles Payne that Haspel cannot employ torture (or “enhanced interrogation”) against prisoners:

McCain himself admitted it.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/02/fred-thompson/mccain-bargained-with-his-vietnamese-captors/

George "Bud" Day and Orson Swindle, fellow POWs, told PolitiFact that POWs sometimes were forced to talk when they were tortured, but they tried to tell lies to mislead their captors.

"We were all tortured and we wrote confessions under the pressure of torture," said Swindle, who was a cellmate with McCain and is active in his campaign. "John McCain never collaborated with the enemy. He, like every one of us, submitted to severe torture. John McCain did nothing dishonorable. He was heroic."

At one point, McCain broke down and signed a confession. But Timberg, the biographer, said McCain deliberately used misspellings, grammatical errors and Communist jargon to show he was writing under duress: "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life . . . "

Day, a Medal of Honor winner who also is supporting McCain's campaign, said the flyer is "the most outrageous f------ lie I've ever heard."

Behind the group

The man behind the flyer is Gerard "Jerry" W. Kiley, 61, of Garnerville, N.Y., who says he served in Vietnam for about a year.

He describes his group as a one-man operation unaffiliated with any political party or campaign. He says he opposes McCain because of the senator's efforts to normalize relations with the Vietnamese communist government and because, in his view, McCain has helped the U.S. government keep information about POWs classified.

"John McCain has made sure the information concerning the lives of Americans we clearly abandoned after the war remain in government files 40 years later," he says.

He teamed with political activist Ted Sampley of North Carolina to distribute the fliers to South Carolina media outlets this month. Sampley did not respond to requests for comment.

Sampley also is a longtime McCain opponent. In 2000, he gained attention when he called McCain a "Manchurian candidate" on his Web site and said that he was an agent of the Vietnamese. In 1993, Sampley was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to 180 days' probation for attacking a McCain aide, according to a 2004 article in the New York Times.

McCain is not the first politician to draw the men's ire. In 2004, they formed Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry.

Kiley has twice interrupted events featuring Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, forcing an American flag in his hand on one occasion and throwing red wine at him on another, according to a Secret Service agent who later arrested Kiley. He admits he threw the wine, but he was later acquitted in federal court of threatening Khai.

Kiley says he bases his most damning charges against McCain — that McCain gave information about the schedule of U.S. attacks in Vietnam in 1967, the year his plane was shot down and McCain was captured — on the word of Earl Hopper, a retired Army colonel.

In an interview, Hopper's wife, Patty, said that Hopper wasn't able to address the charges over the phone because of poor hearing. She said that Hopper has long been involved in the POW movement and that Earl Hopper's son, Earl Jr., is missing in action in Vietnam.

She cited as evidence for Hopper's charges a 1973 article by McCain that ran in U.S. News and World Report and what she said were "declassified U.S. military documents" she claimed to possess describing McCain's collaboration. Patty Hopper said she was away from her Arizona home and could not fax those documents.

But the 1973 article does not back up the charges made in the flyer. It provides the same basic account as McCain's book, corroborated by Timberg's book, which was based on interviews with many POWs.

Timberg, Day and Swindle noted that McCain, the son of a Navy admiral, was offered an early release from the prison but refused so that he could adhere to the military's code of conduct.

Timberg said he was perplexed by the allegations.

"Why do they hate him? There can be lots of issues you disagree with him about. But why try to destroy him?"



www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/17/vietnam-veterans-against-john-mccain/no-evidence-mccain-was-a-traitor/

So perhaps there’s something to be said for that, but not much more. Subsequently he inflated his accomplishments. Let’s not forget that McCain rode his family connections throughout his entire military career, and would never had been so much as a swabbie without them given his dishonorable conduct throughout his career. Navy fighter pilots were a coveted position during the war and McCain was unworthy. He was a lousy pilot wo undoubtedly got shot down through his own incompetence holding a position he should have never had to begin with.

McCain is a veteran and deserves respect for that, but the legend of John McCain and the man don’t exactly reconcile.

Can you back it up?

Just being realistic about the actual John McCain, who was the very definition of black and white!!!

McCain is flawed, but he is not, in fact without honor, and it's not all in the distant past -- You might recall how he defended Barack Obama, then his political opponent frome "He's a Muslim' madness" and how he gave the "kill vote" to the awful Republican Health Bill.

Some of us may be a bit less judgemental.

Because you are a reasonable, thinking and mature adult.

Twas always was, and twill always be.

Took me a loooooong time to figure that out though. I'm glad I finally did. I used to put some on a pedestal not realizing that being human they fucked up too. Even the worst have moments of goodness.

Except for Individual-1. He ain't nothing but a goat fucker.

No one here has forgotten.

If you require perfection in order to recognize any good in a person or appreciate any good deed then you disdain everybody eventually. We all have our line. Yours and mine differ.

Thank you.

I leave his acts to be between him and his God.

The judgemental nastiness is most unappealing at this time.

I agree completely.

Joe Biden might be his buddy, but I can’t bear him.

I have no desire for him to suffer in death, but I have no desire to admire him either.

The past was then, now he is all the things that have been said about him.

I highly respect the man for his service to his country, I disagreed with him many times, but I still respected him as a human being.

Smh.

he isn't dead)

This was deeply harmful to the level of political discourse we now live with.

Obama said that Palin set the table for Trump.

McCain was willing to risk the Presidency be that ignorant, reality-TV creature Palin, should anything happen to him.

This was sheer ambition and political impulse ---the opposite of patriotism.

How soon we all forget.

the truth.

He may not have been the best man in the world, but he was hardly the worst, and I, for one, am sorry to see him go

His meanness, his nastiness, his incompetence as a navy pilot (how many planes did he wreck exactly?), his adultery, and so many other things make the current beatification of him disgusting.

From something as petty as moving out of his Congressional district in Phoenix to a much nicer part of town well before announcing his plan to run for the Senate (I was living in Phoenix at the time, so I recall it quite distinctly), to is possible collusion with the North Vietnamese -- something any number of fellow prisoners spoke about but were ignored, so many of the things he's done show his true character. And it's not a nice character.

Makes me ill! I question your compassion for others!

Give him a damn break

is that we don’t model our behavior on theirs and we don’t mete out compassion to people based on whether we think they are deserving of it.

That’s one way I can tell us apart - but maybe I’ve been mistaken and it turns out that some of us aren’t all that different from them, after all since they think the people they hate deserve it, too ...

It seems that the urge to divide people into us and them, and to despise them runs deep and wide.

We see it here not only when we're talking about McCain, but when we applaud people who cut off contact with family members because they voted for Trump. When we heap scorn on people because they don't cut off contact with family members who voted for Trump. When we eviscerate Democratic candidates and their supporters during primary season who are running against our preferred candidate, and continue to do so long after primary season is over.

We lay the seeds for it with belittling and dehumanizing nicknames for everyone with an R next to their names. When we say that a third of the electorate is not worth any attempt to communicate with them, not because it isn't as strategically wise as focusing on increasing turnout among our solid base, but because those people are so deplorable that we would literally rather not have their votes.

It seems we cannot help ourselves. Yes, Democratic policies are rooted in compassion, but our own tendencies to hate the other should at least give us pause, and some recognition that we are not as different from our political opponents as we think we are.

Yes, the op goes too far. I will question McCains history in a more negative light than the op.

in our political & economic climate. Watching fascists destroy the lives of so many Americans dilutes any compassion for the evil doers and they do evil. IMHO, Some, like Mccain, fall into the old school republican category and aren't completely corrupted. I know he's screwed over the indigenous population in AZ, got caught up in the S&L scandal, voted with the fascists most of the time. When the end comes I will remember him as a vet, a POW who refused early release because of who he was, correcting a supporter at his rally who called Obama a Muslim, voting against the fascist on ACA. I wish he didn't have cancer, I wish he could continue serving AZ as long as he wishes. I wish we could have used the trillions wasted on war to find cures or better treatments for cancer.

and then talk about compassion.

and the author a clueless moron. "Countless Missions" after 30 seconds on google becomes "on his 23 bombing mission".

He even voted against the last re authorization of SCHIP.

Fuck McCain. I wish he wasn't suffering and hope he can be made as comfortable as possible. May his family find peace.

He voted with his party and his political record is crystal clear. Some are worse, some are better. I will not shed any tears.

The man is dying and probably suffering terribly.

I think this is one of those times when if you can’t find something kind to say about someone, it’s better to just remain silent.

The man has his faults, as we all do, but he had his good points too.

The capacity for compassion makes us better and happier people.

When I watch the vitriol pouring out on this thread, it turns my stomach. There is more than enough hate to go around, but doing so under the present circumstances makes us no better as a human being. I somehow expected more from my fellow DUers. I appreciate those people with compassion. It separates us from the narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths of the world.

There's no chance that the OP will be alerted on and hidden nor is there the slightest chance that the DUer who posted the OP will be banned from here. Ergo, it took no courage to post it.

It’s an anonymous website - not posting on it is hardly an ordeal or life-altering event...

Jeez.

I have no recollection of having interacted with you before. I'd make a lousy witness at any trial.

I mean, compared to the USS Forrestal tragedy, the Hanoi Hilton, brain cancer.....

That takes real courage

His hypocrisy is beyond measure. I have always assumed he was a controlled puppet. How the American press fell for his Maverick label is good reason to ignore the press. He is nothing short of a sociopath in my book. Whether dead or alive this man gets way to much of free ride over his military service, which was mainly bombing the shit of a poor populace. His war mongering and self aggrandizement were appalling.

Just to consolidate it in this great thread.

Now It’s The Post Covering Up John McCain’s Mob Connections
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/mccain_s_mob_connections_146.html

And this one from 2000, Haunted by Spirits
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/haunted-by-spirits-6438434

And one last one, Made Man from 2008
https://newrepublic.com/article/64809/made-man

But lost it in a pc crash. Recently, I went looking for it and it's still out there. The way back machine is still well oiled!

His father in law's story fascinates me. Prohibition whiskey guys of the west!

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers it a hate group.

I'll have to see if the assertions are corroborated by trusted sources. Thx, again!

Like Susan Collins, another puppet of McConnell. The corporate media loves to portray both as independent and moderate, but both are loyal tools of McConnell.

There is an urgency to the suffering of those that yet live. Where to start: Children are still being separated, Flint (and too many other places) still doesn't have clean water, Nazis and white supremacists are feeling froggy, snap has been slashed like a murder victim in a b movie, the voting rights act is still in tatters, dolt45 & co is still running things, the scotus is about to undergo a civil rights "make-under"......and too much other crap to list.
As a member of a military family, I will always have a special place for those that have served the country. I'm all for acknowledging Sen. McCain's life's achievements. But we should not kid ourselves about who he is in relation to progressive causes. He's danced the nasty polka of bigotry and prejudice to suit his own political purposes. The first thing I learned of John McCain, as a child, was that he was one of the folks that did not support establishing the national MLK holiday. There'll be plenty of folks brushing over his bald spots when he dies. I'll not participate in lionizing him before then. He can have his day, then, when he's no longer among the living. Until then, there're other folks to highlight.

History!

I'll put my efforts there. Cheers, sister.

I am at the age where the awareness of my mortality is a constant factor in how I view my world and it's inhabitants. It is an attitude that is not easy to explain to those much younger and unnecessary to explain to those who remember when Ike beat Adlai.

I did not like much that John McCain advocated, but I did respect his passion, his courage and, on most days, his bedrock decency. That he was not always kind, not always generous and not always right makes him a human, not a monster.

And,so, at my age, I try to consider how I would react to this news about Mr. McCain if I were similarly situated, i.e., knowingly facing eminent death. Being a very flawed person, I'm not always successful, but today I am. I will be generous and tolerant and forgiving and say simply that I hope his passage is easy and painless and that he has time to leave no "I love you" unsaid.

When my time comes, I hope some will wish the same for me.

You sound like the kind of person I want to be.

who may have missed it.

sorry, at my advanced age, I find that I tolerate fools and hypocrites and utter scum (and, these days, that is pretty much all pukes and their supporters) less and less each passing day.

in your OP, I'm sure nothing I could say would enlighten you.

Sometimes it seems that wisdom is in very short supply. Nice to know there are still people out there that possess it in abundance.

At some point it's time to have a bit of sympathy, even toward our enemies. I think we're at that point with Senator McCain. It's safe to say he won't be participating in politics any more, can't we just give it a rest for a bit? Posts like this make us sound like the hateful far right that we keep claiming we're morally superior to.

If you want to demonize McCain, it's easy to find things to say. He's a warmonger, 'bomb bomb Iran', and much more.

If you want to honor him, you'll look at his service record, and you'll also see the moment he refused to let a woman say that Obama was not an American.

Do you want to wallow in the bad, oozing anger and hatred like a mental bed sore, or celebrate the good, lifting your spirit to appreciate the nuggets of goodness that are in us all? I prefer the latter.

What you are doing is like going to a memorial service and listing all the rotten things the dead person has done. We all have a list; none of us are angels. And if anyone stands up and says, 'what about when he (insert something good here)?' You say, no, none of the good stuff matters because he did these bad things.

While there are a few people on this earth who are such horrific people that they deserve that blanket condemnation, McCain is not one of them.

While acknowledging the bad, I intend to honor the good in John McCain.

a military career if it were not for his father and grandfather, because he was utterly incompetent.

plenty of others can lionize him, praise him. he doesn't need any platitudes from me.

Compared to the lying Republicans who are out there now, McCain seems like a saner Republican. However, he has made some really bad choices that most rational people would not have made.

But he was true to his beliefs more often than most GOP politicians, and I really appreciated what he did in the health care votes last year.

...saying it Niyad.

who was full of hate at a rally and called Obama a Muslim. I salute his service to our nation.

On all these points, he is the polar opposite to Trump. Trump wanted to destroy Obamacare and take away healthcare for 32 million people. McCain put a stop to that. Trump rose to political fortune by accusing Obama of being born outside America and therefore being an illegitimate president, whereas McCain stood up against bigotry towards Obama. And whereas McCain served our nation, Trump draft-dodged, attacked a Gold Star family and denigrated McCain's service.

that was until he foisted the hillbilly from Wasilla unto us.

Please show some compassion. Don't like this post at all. We're better than this

Let the wingers do thi

if you have nothing good to say, better you should say nothing at all.

McCain will soon be history. He was who he was, and soon, he will not be around at all. There are much bigger (and far more dangerous) fish to fry than McCain's ghost. Let him die in peace.

"Haters gotta hate" -- It's the only "point" I can see, and I'm as disgusted by it as you seem to be.

Let it go

and that he has been one of the very, very few GOP voices against Trump in the Congress.

I also remember that moment during one of his Town Halls where a woman disparaged candidate Obama and McCain stood up for Obama -- and the truth.

And I think now, while he is actively dying, is not a time we should be attacking him.

We are better than that. Or we should be.

Ugly post....holy crap. I’m guessing you were looking to drive a wedge here. Didn’t learn a thing about McCain here, but I learned a little about you.

Good grief. Surprised.
Besides, it's Friday for all of us, and we look to be winning today. Have a good weekend Du!

Frankly, this is incredibly tacky. The time to evaluate him as a candidate was a decade ago - unless you live in AZ - but either way, that is the past now. Of course, as with any political career, particularly a long one like McCain's, there is a lot that could be said but this OP seems to go even beyond that. It just feels like very smug grave dancing (and the poor guy is not even gone yet). If anything is 'loathsome', it's that. Not much better than a lot of what we see from the far right.

It's not even about politics in this instance - it's about being able to show even a drop of compassion, even for one second, in what is simply a very sad moment.

We can do better than this.

I thought about sending you a nasty PM, but decided not to.

You are not a nice human being.

I wish we still had Unrec.

We have the momentum. We are on the right side of history. Why throw fuel into the fire of the dying GOP? McCain...flawed man. In today's GOP, he's an extreme moderate for them. He will die, wondering why he allowed a buffoon like Sarah Palin to come so close to the White House. He hates Trump, too. And his ignorance paved his way. McCain's legacy. Not much.

A wonderful quote for this situations.

His war service was honorable, his political career far less so.

Just because somebody is dead or dying doesn't make them a saint. And criticizing somebody who's dead or dying doesn't make one indecent either. . . . Let's not forget that John McCain would have been perfectly happy to foist Sarah Fucking Palin on us as VP. . .