Most Americans are starting to realize that we are making enemies worldwide and actually fomenting terroism by bombing every country that has the audacity not to do our bidding. Yet aging warrior Senator John McCain, a cold war relic of times gone by, thinks the United States can resolve global conflicts by sending in fleets of Superman bombers to “fight a never ending battle for peace, justice and the American way.”
Really Senator McGain, you need to stop watching reruns of Superman and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. How did America ever become a nation that arrogantly bombs other countries on almost a nonstop basis? The average American could not identify four major nations on planet earth that the United States has not bombed in the past 70 years, yet McCain wants more bloodshed.
In the recent past, McCain has urged bombing and military involvement in Nigeria, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, Mali, Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Sudan.
Fortunately when McCain demands more war, more deaths, more destruction, more wasted lives, many are starting to regard him as the demented war mongering fool that he is. Please consider When John McCain makes a case for war, does anyone hear him?
John McCain may be one of the last hawks left in office — but the old bird sure can flap his wings.
The Arizona Republican had planned to hold the Senate floor for half an hour Wednesday morning with fellow senator and friend Lindsey Graham to plead the case yet again for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq. But the South Carolina Republican showed up 20 minutes late, leaving McCain alone to beat the drums of war.
“Now, Madam President, there’s a need for immediate action,” McCain inveighed.
But the only immediate action undertaken by Madam President — Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), doing a shift in the presiding officer’s chair — was to read an e-mail on her phone, which she held in her lap.
“There is wholesale killing and slaughter going on, and it will get worse every single day,” McCain pleaded.
Elsewhere in the chamber, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) was scrolling on her phone, and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) yawned and rubbed his eyes.
It’s a lonely job being an interventionist these days. Not long ago, there were the three amigos — Graham, McCain and Joe Lieberman — leading a powerful group of hawks. Now Lieberman (I-Conn.) is gone, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) leads a growing band of isolationists. Americans, exhausted by war, express more isolationist sentiment than they have in decades. President Obama shows little appetite for military conflict. And Republican congressional leaders have gone to ground. At a news conference Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) demurred on all questions about involvement in Iraq, finally saying, “I don’t need to get into the specifics.”
This left McCain to make the case for war, with assists from his loyal sidekick Graham and a few others. The problem is that nobody seems to be listening, perhaps because McCain has been a predictable voice for intervention for two decades.
Obama may well come around to that view, but he might do it more readily if McCain and others weren’t so eager to politicize the chaos in Iraq. McCain couldn’t help himself on the Senate floor, devoting the first half of his remarks to finger pointing, jabbing at the air with his index finger for emphasis: “Brought us to the state of disaster. . . . Lost the peace. . . . They tried and failed. . . . Focus on this failure.” To this, McCain added boasts about how he predicted recent events.
This was debatable (it was George W. Bush who signed the agreement to remove U.S. troops from Iraq) and, even if true, was not helping McCain’s case for military action. “We have to act. We have to act. We must act,” he proclaimed. He was so fervent that he momentarily lost control of his syntax, warning that “you are going to see a very bigger explosion.”
Clearly McCain wants more wars at any cost – thankfully others don’t see things his way.
Speak Your Mind