People
tell me I should not criticize him right now.
I do
think some people are behaving in bad taste. But I do not think I am prohibited
from making sober remarks at a moment when so many Americans, and the opinion
molders who tell them what to think, are getting ludicrously carried away.
The phenomenon we are witnessing is so
Orwellian that I can’t resist exploring it. I am less concerned with
criticizing McCain — there will be ample time for that — than I am
with trying to understand the regime under which we live, and the media
lackeys that glorify it.
The tributes to McCain from
the major newspapers are so over the top that there’s something more going on
here than the perfunctory respect the media shows for most deceased
politicians.
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They
will not be speaking this way about Pat Buchanan — a real maverick, who was the
first conservative I ever saw who broke with both parties (that’s what a
maverick does) to point out that the sanctions on Iraq were creating a
humanitarian catastrophe that no moral person could support (that’s what an
actual conservative says).
As if
to show that she has every Establishment ritual already down to a science, even
democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to say this:
John McCain’s legacy
represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.
As an intern, I learned a lot
about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen.
Kennedy.
He
meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.
“But
she had to say something!” some say.
She
had to say “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service”?
McCain’s
bellicosity in foreign policy knew no bounds. A discussion of all the
interventions he favored — every one of which would have intensified the
problems it was allegedly to solve — would take all week.
To a conservative movement
that knows nothing of its history, this makes McCain a great conservative
statesman.
And
to the American Establishment, bellicosity is not and has never been a deal
breaker.
McCain’s
preferred foreign policy has yielded death, displacement, and regional chaos on
a massive scale, not to mention a huge shot in the arm to the very Islamic
radicalism he assured us he was fighting against.
(McCain’s
insistence on being involved in every Middle East conflict under the sun made
him some hideous bedfellows, I might add, as when he met with members of
the Northern Storm Brigade, which had handed American journalist Steven Sotloff
over to ISIS for $25,000.)
We
are to believe that McCain was a “maverick.”
This
is because from time to time he joined forces with the Democrats, the left-wing
side of the Establishment, in order to support a measure that just happened to
win him media applause.
That’s
our definition of a maverick now?
Ron
Paul was a maverick.
He
stood up to the entire Establishment, not just its left-wing incarnation, and
its beloved institutions.
He cast the sole “no” vote in
the House more than all other congressmen put together.
He
opposed the Fed when no one else so much as mentioned it, much less criticized
it.
He
stood up to the empire — the whole rotten system, not just one particular
intervention. He even got it through the thick heads of some conservatives that
the bipartisan foreign policy consensus represented the very opposite of
conservatism.
Will
our gatekeepers of approved opinion have such kind words for Ron Paul? The
question answers itself.
The
last thing the regime and its kept media want is a genuine maverick, a true
dissident who asks the questions we are supposed to keep to ourselves.
McCain loved the regime and
the empire. At no time did he adopt a position that the New York Times or the Washington Post would consider a fundamental
attack on the state.
And
that is why they love him. He played by their rules.
They
were thrilled to call him a “conservative,” all the better to police opinion in
America: why, if you’re a conservative, we have this John McCain fellow for
you!
McCain’s legacy lives on in every
politician and journalist who jumps on every propaganda report to justify
another round of bombing and destruction.
It lives on in every politician who, 15 years after another idiotic
military intervention, finally admits it was a “mistake,” never apologizing to
the people he smeared at the time who tried telling him it was a
mistake and who predicted every obvious consequence that any damn fool
should have known.
It lives on in a media that craves
bipartisanship — but bipartisanship in the service of the state, and
bipartisanship in which the left gets what it wants and the right gets a nice
photo-op.
It lives on in the families who are
missing children because of a war that McCain finally admitted had been a
hideous mistake and a ludicrous expenditure of scarce resources.
McCain was a man of the state, in every
fiber of his being. That is why they cheer him.
And that is why we must tell unpopular
truths — about McCain, and the corrupt empire he served.
Tom
Woods [send him
mail; visit his website], a senior fellow of the Mises
Institute, is the New York Times bestselling
author of 12 books and host of the Tom Woods
Show, which libertarians listen to every weekday. Get a free copy
of Your
Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Guns.
Copyright
© 2018 Tom
Woods
Other articles giving
perspective about the late Senator McCain:
McCain's Legacy is Death - https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/thomas-luongo/mccains-legacy-is-death/
McCain and the POW Cover-Up - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/mccain-and-the-pow-cover-up/