Hero Senator John McCain ~ Echo from Dana Milbank opinion

Dana Millbank shares his personal tribute and high opinion for hero, veteran and Senator John McCain, echo published in the Mississippi Meridian Star

WASHINGTON, DC – At long last, have they left no sense of decency? (Donald Trump has still not responded to the ugly comments made about the American hero Senator John McCain.)

White House official Kelly Sadler, during a meeting Thursday, had this to say about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for opposing President Trump's CIA nominee over her failure to condemn torture: "It doesn't matter, he's dying anyway."

Also Thursday, on Fox Business Network, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney had this to say about the torture of McCain, who was shot down over Hanoi with grievous wounds, but refused release to deny his captors a propaganda victory: Torture "worked on John. That's why they call him 'Songbird John.'"

And three days earlier, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, a Trump cheerleader, declared the terminally ill McCain "ridiculous" to prefer that Trump, who has belittled McCain and his heroism, not attend his funeral.

Hatch, Sadler, and the host of the Fox Business show have all apologized, as they should. But how did we let partisanship take us to this ugly place?

McCain is still with us, and this is no obituary. But as Trump loyalists besmirch this good man, I thought I would put in writing what I have often thought over the years: John McCain is the single greatest political leader of our time. 

Senator John McCain is, in a way, not of our time, for his creed – country before self – is unfamiliar to many who serve in office and utterly foreign to the man in charge ~ Donald Trump.

Only once during the nearly quarter of a century I've been covering politics did I think I could work for a politician, and that politician was McCain. I first got to know him in early 1999, when there were just a few of us driving around New Hampshire with him in an SUV, before the "Straight Talk Express" rolled. Had he beaten George W. Bush (he surely would have defeated Al Gore), and had he been president on Sept. 11, 2001, I know he would have done great things with the national unity Bush ultimately squandered.

I've had a closer relationship with McCain than with other politicians. I remember flying with him and Cindy McCain to Phoenix during the 2000 campaign, talking about sports, music, a war buddy – and the issue that defined him: removing the corrupting influence of money from politics. That's why so many liked him even if they disagreed on the issues: With McCain, everything was going to be on the level.

I believed, perhaps naively, that in the free marketplace of ideas, uncorrupted by special interests, we would usually arrive at a sensible consensus. A generation after Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., inspired his "Clean for Gene " followers, McCain inspired me.

On my Bush-Gore election ballot, I wrote in McCain. When I saw him later in the Senate, I'd greet him as "Mr. President."

He'd reply by calling me "Mr. Pulitzer." I took pride in 2009, when McCain read aloud a column of mine on the Senate floor and called me "one of my favorite columnists." 

Nevertheless, Senator McCain regretted thatreading a few months later, when I took him to task for momentarily shedding his "maverick" ways, and he tried to disavow me.

There have been many such moments of disagreement and disappointment: when he put Sarah Palin on his ticket in 2008; when he took a hard-right turn in 2010 to fight off a primary challenge; and when another tough primary in 2016 led him to go easy on Trump.

But the Mac always came back, and never more forcefully than over the past 16 months. In his forthcoming book, he labels "unpatriotic" the "half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems." 

Senator John McCain's single bravest moment may have been earlier, though, when he angered supporters in 2008 by taking the microphone from a woman at a campaign rally who had called Barack Obama an "Arab." Said he: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with."

McCain has, in achievement, equaled or surpassed his mentors and models, Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall. Formally launching his 2008 campaign in Prescott, Arizona, where both men had roots, McCain invoked the friendship of these ideological opposites, who "taught me to believe that we are Americans first and partisans second."

I was with McCain when he returned to Prescott for his last stop of that campaign. Again invoking Udall and Goldwater, McCain retold Udall's joke about Arizona being "the only state where mothers don't tell their children they can grow up to be president."

In Phoenix for a wedding last weekend, I made a pilgrimage north, past the turnoff for Prescott and on to McCain's beloved Sedona. Driving and walking among its red-rock hills, I reflected for hours on the man who had so often spoken of that beautiful place, and who so often had been my antidote to cynicism. As I write this, there are tears on my cheeks.

Godspeed, John McCain. You were not to be president, but you are my hero.

Dana Milbank is a member of The Washington Post Writers Group. Follow him on Twitter @Milbank.

MaineWriter ~ Thank you Dana Milbank.

George Will echo ~ Mike Pence practices "toadyism"

Opinion echo by George Will calls on Vice President Pence to show moral leadership (A good essay published in the Meridian Star, in Mississippi, although, typical of Mr. Will "Sesquipedalian" someone or something that overuses big words, like a philosophy professor or a chemistry textbook. Therefore, my own "Will glossary" is included at the end:)))

WASHINGTON, DC – Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous* Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness**, could, Trump knew, become America's most repulsive public figure. 

And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today's lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year's elections: 

Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. 

At the time, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the "blessing" of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla*** of insincerity. 

Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price.

Before Price's ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, "I can't thank you enough for the privileges you've given me." Pence chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Washington Post's Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: "I'm deeply humbled. ... " Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself "humbled," he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence's refined sense of right and wrong. 

Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.

Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness**** from every pore, called Arpaio "another favorite," professed himself "honored" by Arpaio's presence, and praised him as "a tireless champion of ... the rule of law." 

Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge's order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence's performance occurred eight miles from the home of John McCain, who could teach Pence – or perhaps not – something about honor.

Henry Adams said that "practical politics consists in ignoring facts," but what was the practicality in Pence's disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence's vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. The audience for his praise of Arpaio was given to chanting "Build the wall!" and applauded Arpaio, who wears Trump's pardon like a boutonniere.

Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years – December 1816 to March 1830 – in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois, 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy – it would have been unnecessary – Lincoln lamented that throughout America, "so lately famed for love of law and order," there was a "mobocratic spirit" among "the vicious portion of [the] population." So, "let reverence for the laws ... become the political religion of the nation." 

Pence, one of the evangelicals' favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, etc.) because, well, globalization or health care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

George Will is a member of The Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

Glossary follows:

*exaggeratedly and distastefully complimentary; obsequious

**obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree

***a tiny trace or spark of a specified quality or feeling

**** excessively or ingratiatingly flattering; oily

Another point of view to the same end is here:

A Dozen Reasons Why Mike Pence Is Just As Bad As Donald Trump