There was a report from Bloomberg of
"audible gasps on the Senate floor" as John McCain voted NO on the
Obama Care skinny repeal bill. Gasps, really? I would've gasped had he
done anything different. McCain was simply, predictably, being McCain.
This is the same McCain who continually tries to sabotage Donald
Trump. This is the same McCain he's been for at least 25 years.
Consider
a little history for context sake:
The
Arizona Senator and I first crossed paths during the 1992 Campaign between
incumbent George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. McCain was emerging as a media
darling during this time, putting his days in the Keating Five Savings and Loan
Scandal behind him. The Keating Five? Oh, McCain and four Democrats,
of course. Some things never change. Certainly not McCain.
Meanwhile,
Clinton's team of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos had put North
Carolina squarely in the cross hairs as a must-win state in 92, and a series of
odd events had landed me as Communications Director of NC Bush Quayle.
Thus, as a small government pro-liberty Reagan conservative, I was in the
service of a mushy moderate President who was determined to distance himself
from Reagan, along with his rhetorically challenged VP. It was a root
canal experience, let me tell you.
Team
Bush was struggling because they couldn't, or wouldn't, run clearly to the
right of Clinton and expose the differences. When Ross Perot entered the race,
he further muddied the waters because his agenda agreed with the conservative
agenda about 75% of the time, yet he clearly despised Bush more than he wanted
to defeat Clinton. Whatever Perot's motivations were, the result was that the
92 election was an ideological mess, and Bush was not a man who even understood
that, let alone overcame it.
To
make things worse, enter John McCain, who was riding his war hero story, and a
questionable passion for the pro-life position, into stardom on the right
during this time. A big part of McCain's self-serving strategy was to
ingratiate himself to the liberal media by trashing other Republicans, which he
did often. So, paradoxically, he gained credibility on the right, by trashing
the right, because he became the only man (ostensibly) on the right that the
media liked, and we were desperate on the right to be liked by anyone in the
media. Consider: talk radio was new and small, CNN was the only cable channel,
and Andrew Breitbart was just starting to emerge from his "hippy
dippy" liberal youth (his words).
The
Mainstream Media still ruled the roost, and McCain's message to them was
that Bush "must stop being so extreme," as in so extremely
conservative. The exact opposite was true. Bush wasn't nearly conservative
enough, nor capable of articulating those views on which he was
conservative. Clearly McCain knew this, wanted Bush to lose, and to climb
the ladder in the vacuum a Bush loss would create. And the media was all
too happy to help. I was forced to try and use whatever media influence in
North Carolina I could muster to overcome McCain's message, which is why I
remember it like yesterday.
And
yes, I fully understand that now, everybody on the planet is onto McCain's
schtick. Most of that didn't really happen until at least 2000, and into 2008
and beyond. In ‘92 however, I was on a lonely planet. I even got into a heated
dispute with the host on the G. Gordon Liddy Radio Show in early 1993 about
this. Gordon was still drinking the McCain Kool Aid, as were all of his
listeners.
Now
back to the future: everyone knows what's in the Kool Aid now.
So
here we are, with McCain shaking off the effects of cancer to cast a vote that
ensures we probably won’t get the same treatment he did. The John McCain who
sabotaged the so called 'skinny repeal' vote over Obama Care, and who fought
openly with Donald Trump months ago, is exactly the same John McCain he has
always been. He not only trashes conservatives at every opportunity, he then
takes credit for being this courageous "maverick," even as everybody
knows that trashing conservatives to the media is the easiest, most gutless
thing a person can do.
Almost
everything about McCain's carefully crafted image is a lie. It always has been.
And now, in a somewhat cruel irony, McCain has access to massive amounts of
Obama Care-exempted health care, while voting to make sure you and I remain
trapped under this failed disaster. In other words, McCain is just being
McCain. This is who he's always been.
He
"reached across the aisle" in the 1980's to enrich himself while the
Savings and Loan scandal was bankrupting average Americans. He reached across
the aisle in the 90's to help Bill Clinton. He reached across the aisle in 2005
and 06 in the name of comprehensive immigration reform. He reached across the
aisle to help foist the corrupt Dodd-Frank bill on us. And on and on it
goes.
Now
he's reaching across the aisle in service of a corrupt, lobbyist contrived and
bureaucrat enforced abomination called ObamaCare. Of course he is. This is who
John McCain is, and always has been.
Edmund Wright is a contributor to Breitbart, American Thinker, Newsmax
TV, and author of 2013 Amazon Best Selling Elections book, WTF? How Karl Rove
and the Establishment Lost…Again.
