John Mccain Quotes

I like the fact of John McCain's head being severed. Like that it will fit so much more nicely up George Bush's butt!

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.

Americans Never Quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We Make History. -John McCain

He was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.

At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***!

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.

Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood

If you think all these terrible things about Obama, he asked the woman, how can you possibly be undecided? Because if McCain dies, Palin would be president, she said.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.

I'm not President Bush

Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely and who rely on you

We are the makers of history, not its victims.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle-as we did in the OJ trial-or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina-or as a fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time.

We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears.

And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign, the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain.

What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It’s up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.

I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off.

what remotely educated or even half-conscious living being could consider John McCain a fit candidate for anything?

The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us.

But we’re at a place in our political history when passing legislation through the House with bipartisan support is considered by some folks a greater evil than the problem it’s intended to solve.

No matter what job you get,' he told my mother, 'you can make a good one out of it

Country First

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live. Where's that? Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there.

No just cause is futile, even if it’s lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.

Demographics aren’t destiny. Our culture isn’t the work of one race or religion. To suggest otherwise is to contradict our ideals and to doubt their power.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Ronald Wilson Reagan: America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added, “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.

To be fair, something strange had happened. Donald Trump won the election. There was a Maya Angelou quote that ricocheted across social media during the 2016 election: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Trump showed us who he was gleefully, constantly. He mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam and suggested Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate JFK; he bragged about the size of his penis and mused that his whole life had been motivated by greed; he made no mystery of his bigotry or sexism; he called himself a genius while retweeting conspiracy theories in caps lock.

But, as Winston Churchill observed, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

It took a couple more weeks, and a commitment to being a real pain in the ass...

I stepped on a banana spider today. I didn't crush it, but I did slip and fall. Then I got bit by one of the Three Stooges, possibly John McCain.

Senator John McCain of Arizona came over and gave me a hug. He seemed nearly as distraught as I was.

he [Robert Lovett] knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight. Halberstam, David; John McCain (2002-03-26). The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) (Kindle Locations 448-449). Modern Library. Kindle Edition.

Senator John McCain called Charlottesville “a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons. White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals

Our character is a lifelong project, and perhaps the older we are, and the more fixed our shortcomings are, the more we can use inspiration to encourage our escape from the restraints of our deficiencies. The

Ironically for someone who had so long asserted his own individuality as his first and best defense against insults of any kind, I discovered that faith in myself proved to be the least formidable strength I possessed when confronting alone organized inhumanity on a greater scale than I had conceived possible. Faith in myself was important, and remains important to my self esteem. But I discovered in prison that faith in myself alone, sep0arate from other, more important allegiances , was ultimately no match for the cruelty that human beings could devise when they were entirely unencumbered by respect for the God given dignity of man. This is the lesson I learned in prison. It is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have ever learned.

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. For the first side of this equation, I need no sources. As a conservative, I can confidently attest that whatever else my colleagues might disagree about—Bosnia, John McCain, precisely how many orphans we’re prepared to throw into the snow so the rich can have their tax cuts—we all agree that liberals are stupid. We mean this, of course, in the nicest way. Liberals tend to be nice, and they believe—here is where they go stupid—that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down, that is. Sure, you’ve got your multiple felon and your occasional war criminal, but they’re undoubtedly depraved ’cause they’re deprived. If only we could get social conditions right—eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft—everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to “We Shall Overcome.” Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything.

Why would anyone with half a brain pledge undying loyalty to the party of John McCain or John Kerry, to name the two most recent losers in presidential elections? Only a madman or a mental defective would take a punch for Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner.

We have made mistakes. We haven’t always used our power wisely. We have abused it sometimes and we’ve been arrogant. But, as often as not, we recognized those wrongs, debated them openly, and tried to do better. And the good we have done for humanity surpasses the damage caused by our errors. We have sought to make the world more stable and secure, not just our own society. We have advanced norms and rules of international relations that have benefited all. We have stood up to tyrants for mistreating their people even when they didn’t threaten us, not always, but often. We don’t steal other people’s wealth. We don’t take their land. We don’t build walls to freedom and opportunity. We tear them down. To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic. American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. Those attachments belong with other tired dogmas that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.

Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased. An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.

Typically, he found some value in his troublemaking and in the punishment he earned for it. "You get to know people that you don't ordinarily know if you're one of the good boys. And sometimes the world's not always made up of all the good boys either, not by a long shot," he said.

What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner's shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike's flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us. "The guards discovered Mike's flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike's they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and begun sewing a new flag.

was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind. “No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton. “Oh, okay,” Trump said.

... General Petraeus recognized the sacrifice made by two soldiers who had planned to become naturalized citizens at the ceremony, and were now represented by two pairs of boots on two chairs, having been killed in action two days before. "They died serving a country that was not yet theirs," Petraeus observed... I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country's resources or a threat to our "culture" could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.

[One of the biggest differences between him and his rivals for the Republican nomination was] "every one of them wants to torture people. It's amazing.

Asked who attacked America on 9/11, [Sarah Palin] suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein.

In America, we have always believed that if the day was a disappointment, we would win tomorrow. That’s what John Lewis believed when he marched across this bridge.

When a reporter asked me the next day if I had something to say to the terrorists responsible for the mass murders of the day before, I answered, “We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won’t.

He maligned war hero John McCain for “getting caught” in Vietnam, even as McCain was dying; and then he maligned him again after his death. He fanned the proverbial flames of existing racial tensions and exacerbated the situation with his petulant undiplomatic style. He then went somewhere beyond petty upon the death of Georgia representative John Lewis, a true civil rights hero, when he simply dismissed him because “he didn’t have nice things to say about me.

I don't mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I've had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.

Senator John McCain did not mince words in his statement: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.” The Arizona Republican senator added, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.

Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He said that as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War McCain, whose father was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind. “No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton. “Oh, okay,” Trump said.

In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her. "I loved what I missed most from my life at home: my family and friends; the sights and sounds of my own country; the hustle and purposefulness of Americans; their fervid independence; sports; music; information--all the attractive qualities of American life. But though I longed for the things at home I cherished the most, I still shared the ideals of America. And since those ideals were all that I possessed of my country, they became all the more important to me.

Some might read this and say to themselves, "Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?" But it's not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God's children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation that we are.

McConnell was the case that declared constitutional the next clamp-down on campaign finance, the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred political parties from taking soft money and blocked union and corporate political ad spending shortly before an election. At the time, it was hard not to think that the law grew, at least in part, out of an embarrassed Senator John McCain’s wish to transfer the blame to “the system” for his having unwittingly helped a constituent and contributor who turned out to be a $3 billion savings-and-loan fraudster.

The time for politics and party loyalty is over. Do your own homework. If you just take the administration’s word for it (or John McCain or John Boehner or Lindsey Graham’s for that matter) that it’s ‘slam dunk’ case, I believe you are part of the problem. Likewise, if you are against it just because I said so but you really don’t know why – you are part of the problem too. You are stopping, dare I say it – progress. If we continue to allow others to dictate our thinking then we deserve what we reap. But the innocent people who will suffer in the Middle East do not.

The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society. Even John McCain, the 2008 U.S. Republican presidential candidate, complained constantly in his campaign speeches of “the greed of Wall Street.” Smith had a diagnosis for this: he called promoters of excessive risk in search of profits “prodigals and projectors”—which, by the way, is quite a good description of many of the entrepreneurs of credit swaps insurances and subprime mortgages over the recent past.

Graham knew McCain hated Trump. He knew that in Washington, you had to deal with people who hated you. But he did not impart that particular piece of advice to the president. “My chief job is to keep John McCain calm,” Graham remarked. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “scared to death of John McCain. Because John knows no boundaries. He’ll pop our leadership as much as he’ll pop their leadership. And I will, at times, but mine’s more calculated. John’s just purely John. He’s just the world’s nicest man. And a media whore like me. Anyway, he’s a much nicer guy than I am.

Most of the coverage I received was fine. I didn’t agree with all of it. I disliked the criticism I received, although I earned some of it. I also understand why my opponent’s campaign made such good copy and attracted more attention than ours did. He was new news. I wasn’t. And most reporters were more aligned with his politics than mine.

I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country’s resources or a threat to our “culture” could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.

Sparing Putin any serious penalty for his assault on our democracy doesn’t just encourage further aggression, it tells the victims and potential victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and Montenegro, and in Russia itself, that the United States, the greatest power in the world, couldn’t be relied on to defend its own democracy.

In 2015, Trump had made one of his most cruel and thoughtless comments about McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Graham knew McCain hated Trump. He knew that in Washington, you had to deal with people who hated you. But he did not impart that particular piece of advice to the president. “My chief job is to keep John McCain calm,” Graham remarked. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “scared to death of John McCain. Because John knows no boundaries. He’ll pop our leadership as much as he’ll pop their leadership. And I will, at times, but mine’s more calculated. John’s just purely John. He’s just the world’s nicest man. And a media whore like me. Anyway, he’s a much nicer guy than I am.

You have two choices, [Plouffe] told Obama. You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.

An analysis of 15 years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that men interrupt more than women. And they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men... An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back... But there’s a problem... interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017, US senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive attorney general Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn, on two separate occasions, interrupted and admonished by senator John McCain for her questioning style. He did not do the same to her (male) colleague Senator Ron Wyden who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning. And it was only Harris who was then dubbed ‘hysterical’.

influences. I took from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that defending the dignity of others is never a lost cause whether you succeed or not. And I thrill to the exhortation in the poem that inspired the novel, to be “part of the main,” to be “involved in mankind.” It’s who we are. The right to life and liberty, to be governed by consent and ruled by laws, to have equal justice and protection of property, these values are the core of our national identity. And it is fidelity to them—not ethnicity or religion, culture or class—that makes one an American. To accept the abolition or abridgement of those rights in other societies should be no less false to Americans than their abridgment in our own society. Human rights are not our invention. They don’t represent standards from which particular cultures or religions can be exempted. They are universal. They exist above the state and beyond history. They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. That’s our creed. The authors put it right at the beginning of the manifesto they wrote to declare our independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

So who is the real Jerry Falwell? Is he a rabid, hate-spewing fundamentalist? Or is he a dutiful family man, a talented preacher, and a competent administrator? Was John McCain right when he called Dr. Falwell an “agent of intolerance” during the 2000 presidential campaign? Or was the Wall Street Journal right when, in 1978, it described him as a “man of charm, drive, talent, and ambition”? Well, in a way, both are right. In fact, that’s the overwhelming impression I get from the time I’ve spent watching Dr. Falwell this semester and talking to him this afternoon: he’s a complex character, but he’s not hiding anything. He may be a blundering, arch-conservative provocateur, and he may spew anti-gay venom more often than most people brush their teeth, but I honestly think he believes every word he preaches, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he really does stay awake at night worrying about the homosexual agenda, the evils of abortion, and the imminent spread of liberalism. He really does think America needs to be saved.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone’s nonprofessional, have come to a point on the Trail where you’ve started fearing your own cynicism every bit as much as you fear your credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you’re apt to find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of reprieve and a certain Young Voter named McCain’s refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs’ cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines “the real John McCain” still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain “real” is: impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. That’s why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, be apprised that a “profile” of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there’s way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox—the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles’ spinning cubes and squares and boxes that layer McCain—is that whether he’s “for real” depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

If we don’t accept that the nature of a regime shapes its conduct, we risk profoundly misreading international politics. We expect better behavior from despots than we have reason to. We miss what can be the most transformational force for good in the world: the anger of oppressed people, and their hope, their imperishable hope for change. That anger and hope filled the streets of East Berlin twenty-nine years ago, tore down a wall separating half a continent from liberty, and made the United States and our allies a whole lot safer. A world where the human rights of more people in more places are secure is not only a more just world, it’s a safer world. For reasons of basic self-interest we must continue to lead the long, patient effort to make the world freer and more just.

REGULARLY ATTEND AN ANNUAL security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The only thing unusual about the November 2016 meeting was that it occurred just after the U.S. presidential election, and most of the formal and informal conversations among the conferees were about what to expect from the President-elect, Donald Trump. The subject was causing consternation among the governments, military, and intelligentsia of the West, including ours. I spent most of my time in Halifax reassuring friends that the United States government consists of more than the White House. Congress and, I hoped, the people the new President would appoint to senior national security positions would provide continuity in U.S. foreign policy, compensate for the lack of experience in the Oval Office, and restrain the occupant from impulsively reacting to world events. Saturday evening, when the day’s presentations were finished, a retired British diplomat, who had served as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia during

We had reached a “decisive moment” in the conflict, I began. Seventy-five hundred lives had been lost, and the regime was committing crimes against humanity. Most of the world had turned against Assad. The Arab League had expelled Syria and the U.N. General Assembly had rebuked the regime, though Russia and China used their vetoes to protect Assad in the Security Council. The Russians hadn’t yet intervened militarily, though Moscow and Beijing were supplying arms and other assistance to the regime. Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world, and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, had deployed fighters to the conflict. There were already Revolutionary Guard officers in Syria, but the full extent of Iran’s involvement was a year away. ISIS hadn’t yet exploited the conflict to establish the center of its caliphate. Had the U.S. and Europe intervened in that first year of the conflict, eliminated Assad’s airpower advantage, and provided the FSA arms and munitions, including antitank weapons, I believe it would have been decisive. The regime would have collapsed and Assad, if he had survived, would likely have fled the country. Hundreds of thousands of lives might have been spared.

Zubaydah was transferred in 2006 to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The videotapes of his interrogations, along with recordings of the torture of other detainees, were ordered destroyed by the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, despite standing orders from the White House Counsel’s Office to preserve them. According to his attorney, Zubaydah, who remains in Guantánamo today, has “permanent brain damage,” has suffered hundreds of seizures, and “cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name.” Some might read this and say to themselves, “Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?” But it’s not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of our wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God’s children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation we are. My fellow POWs and I could work up very intense hatred for the people who tortured us. We cussed them, made up degrading names for them, swore we would get back at them someday. That kind of resistance, angry and pugnacious, can only carry you so far when your enemy holds most of the cards and hasn’t any scruples about beating the resistance out of you however long it takes. Eventually, you won’t cuss them. You won’t refuse to bow. You won’t swear revenge. Still, they can’t make you surrender what they really want from you, your assent to their supremacy. No, you don’t have to give them that, not in your heart. And your last resistance, the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you. The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.

The war against ISIS in Iraq was a long, hard slog, and for a time the administration was as guilty of hyping progress as the most imaginative briefers at the old “Five O’Clock Follies” in Saigon had been. In May 2015, an ISIS assault on Ramadi and a sandstorm that grounded U.S. planes sent Iraqi forces and U.S. Special Forces embedded with them fleeing the city. Thanks to growing hostility between the Iraqi government and Iranian-supported militias in the battle, the city wouldn’t be taken until the end of the year. Before it was over we had sent well over five thousand military personnel back to Iraq, including Special Forces operators embedded as advisors with Iraqi and Kurdish units. A Navy SEAL, a native Arizonan whom I had known when he was a boy, was killed in northern Iraq. His name was Charles Keating IV, the grandson of my old benefactor, with whom I had been implicated all those years ago in the scandal his name had branded. He was by all accounts a brave and fine man, and I mourned his loss. Special Forces operators were on the front lines when the liberation of Mosul began in October 2016. At immense cost, Mosul was mostly cleared of ISIS fighters by the end of July 2017, though sporadic fighting continued for months. The city was in ruins, and the traumatized civilian population was desolate. By December ISIS had been defeated everywhere in Iraq. I believe that had U.S. forces retained a modest but effective presence in Iraq after 2011 many of these tragic events might have been avoided or mitigated. Would ISIS nihilists unleashed in the fury and slaughter of the Syrian civil war have extended their dystopian caliphate to Iraq had ten thousand or more Americans been in country? Probably, but with American advisors and airpower already on the scene and embedded with Iraqi security forces, I think their advance would have been blunted before they had seized so much territory and subjected millions to the nightmare of ISIS rule. Would Maliki have concentrated so much power and alienated Sunnis so badly that the insurgency would catch fire again? Would Iran’s influence have been as detrimental as it was? Would Iraqis have collaborated to prevent a full-scale civil war from erupting? No one can answer for certain. But I believe that our presence there would have had positive effects. All we can say for certain is that Iraq still has a difficult road to walk, but another opportunity to progress toward that hopeful vision of a democratic, independent nation that’s learned to accommodate its sectarian differences, which generations of Iraqis have suffered without and hundreds of thousands of Americans risked everything for.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

Pero este tipo de argumentos no tuvo mucho peso cuando el viernes 29 de septiembre del 2006 el Senado de Estados Unidos autorizó la construcción de un muro de casi 700 millas en la frontera con México. Ni siquiera hubo fuerte oposición. Ochenta senadores votaron a favor (incluyendo a Barack Obama y John McCain) y sólo diecinueve se opusieron.

Contradicts John McCain The Huffington Post

At the G-20 meeting in Paris in 2011, finance ministers expressed fears that U.S.-driven global inflation was threatening global stability. George Melloan was among those who made the connection between this unrest and QE. He acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal: “Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do.” To appreciate the depth of political upheaval created by the 2008 financial crisis, just tally the power shifts that occurred in its wake. In addition to the turmoil in the Middle East, 13 out of 17 European governments changed over as a result of the initial financial crisis. In the United States, the stock market panic in September 2008 reversed the slight lead of John McCain and helped sweep the far-left Barack Obama into office.

Then there is the matter of the presidential untruths. The problem is not just that Barack Obama says things that are untrue but that he lies about what Barack Obama has said. He brags that he set red lines, but then he says it was the U.N. had set red lines. He boasts of pulling out every U.S. soldier from Iraq but then alleges that President Bush, the Iraqis, or Maliki did that. He claims that ISIS are Jayvees but then claims they are serious. But his prevarication too is habitual and was known in 2008 when it was discovered that he had simply misled the nation about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He had no desire, in the transparent manner of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain, or George W. Bush, to release his medical records or college transcripts. If Americans find their president ill-informed, there was no record that he was informed in 2008. His gaffes were far more frequent than those of Sarah Palin, who knew there were 50 states.

On New Year’s Day, Hillary and Bill were out on a boat, bobbing along on the blue-green sea, and decided to take a swim. They leapt into the water, swam up to the beach, and then Hillary posed the question directly to the person who knew her best—and who understood as well as anyone alive what running for president entailed. What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not? You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you’re not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don’t do it. That’s all I can tell you, Bill said. Not long after, Solis Doyle’s phone rang back in Washington. “Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job and be the best one, then I should do it,” Hillary said. “And I do believe that.” Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled. “Okay! Let’s go, then!” Patti said, and they were finally off and running.

On New Year’s Day, Hillary and Bill were out on a boat, bobbing along on the blue-green sea, and decided to take a swim. They leapt into the water, swam up to the beach, and then Hillary posed the question directly to the person who knew her best—and who understood as well as anyone alive what running for president entailed. What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not? You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you’re not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don’t do it. That’s all I can tell you, Bill said. Not long after, Solis Doyle’s phone rang back in Washington. “Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job and be the best one, then I should do it,” Hillary said. “And I do believe that.” Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled. “Okay! Let’s go, then!” Patti said, and they were finally off and running.

While serving as a pallbearer for one of his Naval Academy classmates on a cold, rainy day at Arlington National Cemetery, my grandfather listened to a young officer suggest that he button up his raincoat to protect himself from the elements. The old man, raincoat flapping in the wind, looked at his solicitous subordinate and said, “You don’t think I got where I am by taking care of my health, do you?

I don’t feel that way about the war,” I replied, and was threatened for what seemed like the hundredth time with a warning that I would be denied an operation because of my “bad attitude.

One of the greatest weaknesses of Chris Mitchell’s editorship of the Australian is that he has allowed Greg Sheridan to remain his foreign editor throughout. Sheridan is a man who argued in different columns that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of our era; that unlike mediocre politicians like Barack Obama and John McCain, the “new star” of American politics, Sarah Palin, was able to combine “celebrity” with “character”; that President Obama’s “anti-Israel hysteria” was leading his administration toward “licensing a mutant strain of anti-semitism”; and that the United States would most likely be strengthened by the crash of Wall Street in September 2008.

Three days later, after the Chris Cox episode, a friend emailed Obama asking what he thought explained McCain’s wild swings and oscillations. “No fucking discipline,” Obama replied. As

Republicans accept as a well-documented fact of life that an overwhelming majority of the media is slanted against them.4 They take critical media coverage for granted. The Obama administration does not. So much so that harsh criticism by a news outlet is viewed as intolerable dissent. Moreover, this broadside from the president of the United States was not buttressed by facts. Pew Research Center found that from September 8 through October 16 of the 2008 campaign—the heat of the election cycle—40 percent of Fox News stories on then-Senator Obama were negative as were 40 percent of the network’s stories on Senator John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent. You can’t get more fair and balanced than that. If you wanted to see bias against a candidate, CNN and MSNBC were better examples. Pew found that 61 percent of CNN’s stories on John McCain were negative, compared to only 39 percent of their Obama stories. The disparity was even greater at MSNBC where a mere 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories (and only 10 percent of MSNBC’s coverage of McCain was rated as positive). Overall, according to an October 2007 study of media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (funded by Pew) in collaboration with Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, the press gave much more favorable coverage to Democratic candidates, noting, for example, that 46.7 percent of stories about Barack Obama had a positive tone, while only 12.4 percent of stories about John McCain did.5 Obama should have been counting his blessings, not complaining about the one news television outlet that wouldn’t fall in line. He had received, by some measures, the most laudatory press coverage of any senatorial or presidential candidate in recent history.6

With whites pulling away from the Democrats and accustomed to prevailing in presidential elections through their sheer numbers, the outcome of the 2008 election was seen not merely as the defeat of John McCain, but perhaps a defeat of the historic ruling majority itself, “a challenge to the absoluteness of whites’ dominance,” wrote the political scientist Ashley Jardina of Duke University, who specializes in the behavior of the white electorate.

I've tried to deserve the privilege the best I can,' John McCain] said. 'And I've been repaid one thousand times over with adventures and good company, with the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself, of being a bit player in the extraordinary story of America. And I am so grateful.

In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.

I’m a Reagan Republican, a proponent of lower taxes, less government, free markets, free trade, defense readiness, and democratic internationalism.

decree of Arizona Senator John McCain’s deceptively titled “Idaho and Arizona Conservation Act of 1988,” along with a half-million dollars paid for the services of the Washington, DC, lobbying powerhouse Patton, Boggs, and Blow, the project

For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama, guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.

At that moment, though, she stood there on stage, perched atop a pair of ruby-red heels, looking less like Eliza Doolittle than Dorothy; the girl swept up in the cyclone, lifted out of her black-and-white world and deposited in a Technicolor Oz.

Monday after John McCain died. I showed up for work and noticed that the flag over the White House was not at half-staff. Why would the flag not be at half-staff following the death of someone widely seen as an American hero?

He had just gotten word that the apocalypse was nigh.

And although it hurts when people think less well of us than we deserve, our integrity, our self-respect, and our happiness do not ultimately depend upon the opinion of others. They depend upon our own conscience. We must be true to ourselves. And we must be true to others, whether they believe we are or not.

The following day, Netanyahu and I sat down for a meeting at the White House. Downplaying the growing tension, I accepted the fiction that the permit announcement had been just a misunderstanding, and our discussions ran well over the allotted time. Because I had another commitment and Netanyahu still had a few items he wanted to cover, I suggested we pause and resume the conversation in an hour, arranging in the meantime for his delegation to regroup in the Roosevelt Room. He said he was happy to wait, and after that second session, we ended the evening on cordial terms, having met for more than two hours total. The next day, however, Rahm stormed into the office, saying there were media reports that I’d deliberately snubbed Netanyahu by keeping him waiting, leading to accusations that I had allowed a case of personal pique to damage the vital U.S.-Israel relationship. That was a rare instance when I outcursed Rahm. Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make in the sweep of history—whether those of us who rise to power are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come. I wonder whether our insecurities and our hopes, our childhood traumas or memories of unexpected kindness carry as much force as any technological shift or socioeconomic trend. I wonder whether a President Hillary Clinton or President John McCain might have elicited more trust from the two sides; whether things might have played out differently if someone other than Netanyahu had occupied the prime minister’s seat or if Abbas had been a younger man, more intent on making his mark than protecting himself from criticism.

The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.