Political messages from McCain funeral

Since this past week has been a non-stop celebration of John McCain ideology in the American press, I'll add my own bit of praise for McCain's posthumous accomplishment: he made his funeral a slap in the face of the current President, who McCain had good reason to despise. And he managed to have the last Democratic President be the main deliverer of the message of McCain's greatness. And to do so in a way that reflected his famous no-red-America-no-blue-America speech of 2004 at a time when McCain's own party is practicing willing partisanship in support of a criminal President while the Democratic Party is afraid to take a partisan stance against that President and in favor of the Constitutional order.

Of course, George W. Bush gave a eulogy, too, at McCain's request. Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen, managed to read his text without notably stumbling. And there was also the signature smirk, when he seemed to take special pride in getting out a complete sentence.

George W. Bush: John McCain 'Made Me Better' NBC News 09/01/2018:

According to Shrub Bush, McCain spoke for "the little guy" and for "forgotten people and forgetten places."

I suppose some of the beneficiaries of the plutocratic tax cuts which he supported were short, so I guess that could be standing up for "the little guy."

What was consistent with McCain's record was the neoconservative refrain that Bush and McCain used to justify the Iraq War that it was all about liberating "death camps" and the like, the mission to bring freedom to countries like Iraq by invading their country, killing hundreds of thousands of their people, and plunging them into protracted conflict and instability. Or, in Shrub's words in the eulogy, "the true peace that comes only with freedom." The peace of the grave is more like it.

Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney created the torture program and the parallel system of "justice" thjat still stumbles along at Guantanamo. McCain criticized the torture policy. But he certainly wasn't willing to take any drastic political action to stop it. And the Torture President is one of the people he specified he wanted to give a speech at his funeral.

Barack Obama's presentation was more than twice as long as Bush's. Barack Obama On John McCain: 'We Never Doubted We Were On The Same Team' NBC News

As I predicted last week, one of the two Presidents giving eulogies was a Republican praising a Republican. And that Obama's speech would inevitably be the more eloquent or memorable of the two. That was true. Not that it took any great predictive powers to guess that.

I'll give Obama credit for noting, in his mild way, that "John was a pretty conservative guy." But it was in the context of praising his Maverick greatness. And, of course, as I also predicted, he praised the virtues of moderation and bipartisanship. McCain "did understand that some principles transcend politics," Obama said. That some values that transcend party." Those principles he listed as self-government, the Constitution, etc., etc. "even the arcane rules and procedures of the Senate." And, of course, the bold Maverick would "occasionally work across the aisle," that dreadful phrase that has come to basically mean that Democrats like to surrender to Republicans.

Democrats will mostly gush about how Obama's mom-and-apple-pie invocation of American virtues to be a mighty putdown of Trump's Administration. Obviously, he didn't go so far as to explicitly condemn the kidnapping of immigrant children.

And then the talking heads even on the "liberal" MSNBC will advise the Democrats to follow his advice by surrendering to Republicans. Which way too many of them are inclined to do anyway!

The recollections Ben Norton shares in this report for The Real News wouldn't have been appropriate for a funeral service. But they are very relevant to what McCain's actual historical legacy is, John McCain: Hawkish Voice of Military-Industrial Complex, Paved Way for Trump 08/31/2018: