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The Pieces of the McCain Puzzle

A good read, this [1], from the American Spectator, that futhers the point [2] I made the other day about the difference in treatment by the press, and the left as a whole, of John McCain by pointing to Senator Jeremiah Denton.

I’m willing to bet most of you don’t remember the man. I do.

Big Media mocked his first signature effort at legislation, the Adolescent Family Life Act. His proposal was an adaptation of existing legislation enacted under sponsorship of Democratic icon Ted Kennedy. Denton’s bill modified the Kennedy program to increase emphasis on reaching teenagers before they had sexual experience with the message that abstinence is not to be devalued as a means of preventing pregnancy and disease.

Denton shrewdly enlisted support from Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Shriver. Kennedy cooperated with Denton in passage of the bill. Ignoring the overwhelming support Denton negotiated, the cultural left had a raucous good time lampooning his efforts. No clearer sign of the times was that Garry Trudeau devoted an entire Sunday “Doonesbury” ridiculing Denton’s “chastity bill.”

In this and other instances, Denton worked carefully and discreetly to bring about success for conservative policies through sincere bipartisan negotiation.

This contrasts with McCain’s vaunted reputation for what his apologists wrongly called bipartisanship. What McCain actually did, again and again, was to sabotage consensus within his own party out of an impulse for gaining attention and increasing his negotiating position in regard to other interests.

With no discernible principle or regard for the public interest on his side, McCain single-handedly sabotaged the repeal of Obamacare. No one can say honestly that his motivation was anything other than spite for President Trump.

The article goes on to continue the comparison with this rather key paragraph:

Another difference was in character. Senators normally have very big egos, and Denton was normal in this sense. McCain was an outlier — an extraordinary egomaniac — even within a universe of enormous egos.

All of this is pretty much what I’ve been saying. The stark difference in treatment between Denton and McCain by the press and by the left is breathtaking.

I said in the comments of the other post…

I notice with interest that the Democrats gave no honor whatsoever to Chris Kyle.

Yet, they practically wet themselves over John McCain. Why?

The only conclusion that one can draw from that is that This is not about whether or not John McCain served honorably.  in my view that still a matter of question, but in the process of that I’ll suggest to you that Chris Kyle did as well. The reason for that difference in their response is because McCain reflected their politics more correctly.

…and that reaction from the Preston from the Democrats is precisely the reason for the former post. What we are witness to was the results of political expediency not any kind of Honor really.

But in the process of that discussion there’s a lot of information that’s coming up about McCain which makes me wonder if a lot of the people that are heaping Praise on him these days really understood what the man was about.

As an example of that resurfacing information, there is the issue of POWs Left Behind after Denton and McCain were released in 1973, which was covered in The Nation , back on August 6th of 2008, and reprinted earlier today in expanded form in World News Daily. [3]

Wriiten by Sydney H. Schanberg, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for international reporting “at great risk” from Vietnam and Cambodia. After the war he served as city editor of the New York Times. The Academy Award-winning film “The Killing Fields” was based on his book “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” Schanberg was a journalist for 50 years.

It has some things to add to this puzzle… Notably, McCain’s rather puzzling, and troubling efforts to keep that POW information buried, so to speak.

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge – only records that revealed no POW secrets – it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, when the Pentagon cited McCain’s bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all – even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

As I said, pieces of the puzzle. The picture that is emerging is less than complimentary. At the very least it gives pause do any notion that the man was a hero by any definition.