SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
How McCain Got the Last Word Against Trump (archive)
By the time he died on Saturday, Mr. McCain had carefully stage-managed a four-day celebration of his life — but what was also an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump and his agenda. For years, Mr. Trump had used Twitter and the presidential bully pulpit to mock and condemn the senator. In death, Mr. McCain found a way to have the last word, even quietly making it clear through friends that Mr. Trump was not welcome at the services.
“I think it’s fair to say that they have a very different view of this country and what this country means, here and abroad,” said Mark Salter, the senator’s longtime friend and co-author who sat with Mr. McCain — often with a lump in his throat — during the many discussions about his looming death. “His overall message was: ‘It doesn’t have to be this shitty.’”
The series of events honoring Mr. McCain is the kind of grandiose spectacle that is normally reserved for someone who became president, not someone who twice failed to do so. Friends said that Mr. McCain was surprised by the level of interest in his death even as he planned it.
When advisers suggested that his coffin should lie in state at the Arizona Capitol, Mr. McCain said he believed the legislature would never approve such a rare honor for him, recalled Rick Davis, who had been at Mr. McCain’s side for decades and served as his 2008 campaign chairman. “Every inch of the way, he underestimated what he thought this would be about,” Mr. Davis said.
The memorial events this week began in Arizona on Wednesday, when Mr. McCain’s body was taken to the Capitol, and will continue Thursday at a service at North Phoenix Baptist Church. The procession will then shift to the nation’s capital, when Mr. McCain’s coffin will arrive at an air base outside Washington as the president holds one of his raucous campaign-style rallies for supporters in Indiana.
By the weekend, when virtually all of official Washington — Democrats and Republicans alike — gathers at the National Cathedral for a nationally televised farewell, Mr. Trump is expected to have retreated to Camp David, where White House aides hope he will contain his anger at the attention being lavished on Mr. McCain.
[...] Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist who survived two poisoning attempts for his opposition to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, said that Mr. McCain, who was widely seen as one of the Russian leader’s fiercest detractors, had also asked him in April to be a pallbearer. “He spoke the truth regardless of party or political situations,” Mr. Kara-Murza said. “That was his defining characteristic.”
In Washington, a town where Mr. Trump has given Mr. Putin an open invitation to visit, Mr. Kara-Murza said that Mr. McCain’s choice of a Russian pallbearer — one repeatedly brought to the brink of death for challenging his country’s authoritarian brand of politics — was “actually pretty symbolic.”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @07:56PM (13 children)
Trump knows politics, and is resisting the urge to honor McCain appropriately.
Appropriately in this case: piss on his grave
Your idea of "understanding of human interaction, empathy, and respect for others" is absurd. Let's go there: would you have wanted to attend a respectful funeral for Hitler? How about Osama, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein? Some people are simply undeserving. At best they should be chucked into a trash compacter.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by requerdanos on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:29PM (3 children)
Thank you for your reasoned reply. My thanks here are, for what it's worth, genuine.
I don't know about absurd, but it's certainly not a universal one, however much it might enjoy majority or plurality, whichever the case may be.
I cite these two over the others because they died during my adult life and within my knowledge. Yes, I would have been interested in attending a respectful funeral for these people. Besides having basic respect for them as humans, I have even visited the home countries of each. However they too may have lacked understanding of human interaction, empathy, and respect for others, and however much damage they may have done within their unfortunately large sphere of influence, they were all still people and despite their overwhelmingly negative actions and the public perception thereof, they still had value as humans which can be recognized with respect even be that unpopular. [This applies to Hitler, Pol Pot, etc. as well.]
If your worldview allows respect for others only as objects that can be beneficial to you or to those you are interested in, or not, then the conclusion that some of them are only worth trash is going to come up a lot more often than just in the case of major political leaders. Most of the seven billion people in the world have never done anything special to benefit you personally or to tickle your notions of goodness. Indeed, most also harbor hatred, strife, and various flavors of evil in their hearts, tagging them as "deserving" of disrespect. But even if people have worked to try to deserve disrespect, I submit that there is a base level at which even the evil-at-core should be respected as being human.
The idea is to "love your neighbors" because they are human, and not based on whether they "deserve" your personal respect of their humanity to be respected or shown common decency.
It's precisely this difference that I came today to have questions about with respect to the President.
I don't say that you necessarily should feel the same way; and certainly, opinions and feelings will vary. But I hope that this approach becomes more and more common, and not less and less. Especially in our leaders.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @02:43AM
Some people are more deserving of respect than others.
One of humanity's most common problems is distinguishing between respect and freindship, or "liking". I've liked a lot of people, who I didn't consider worthy of much respect. I've respected a lot of other people who I didn't like. It's great when you actually like a respectable person. But bottom line - the two words should never be used synonymously.
McCain? There were things I liked about him, and more things that I didn't like. Those likes and dislikes had little influence on my respect for him. He did a few respectable things. He also did a boatload of things that were worthy of disrespect.
I don't fall into the rather small camp of people who hate the man, but I sure as hell can't be part of this posthumous McCain worship.
John McCain is just another man, who like most men, did some really good stuff now and then, and did some really shitty stuff now and then.
As I've pointed out in the past, it's really great to be the grandson of an admiral, and the son of another admiral. Your fuckups are easily covered over, and your smallest achievements are blown into national achievements. Damn, I wish my daddy had been an admiral!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Joe on Friday August 31 2018, @08:48PM (1 child)
I have a lot of problems understanding your approach. I'll briefly detail mine so you can see the differences:
Start with a base level of care, respect, and trust for humans.
Adjust those base levels, up or down, based on the past actions/inaction of the individual, then correct for outside factors (e.g. difficult upbringing, desperate situation, cultural factors, etc.).
The levels are then further adjusted to account for predicted future behavior.
Finally, the levels determine the overall value of the individual in relation to others.
It seems to me that either you don't adjust from the base level or you have a lower limit for how far you adjust downward. Either way, the lowest level of value you place on a person extends all the way to respecting their dead flesh or the concept of their existence.
Your approach is scope insensitive, weighted by some sort of availability heuristic or salience bias, and that does not adjust for death (extended-self hypothesis).
Time, resources, and emotional energy are all limited and there are billions of people in the world. Even if you believe that something like Hitler's dead body has some positive value that warrants time and respect, it should be so far down the list of priorities that its effective value is negligible.
- Joe
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:26AM
The base respect level is, in the approach I describe, the floor, below which you can't adjust.
Silly example: "Such and such did nothing but cause people grief, murder thousands of children while their parents watched, and tortured kittens, for no reason but just as a hobby out of boredom. The only thing left to respect is their basic humanity and what a waste their time on earth was." == still more valuable than garbage, because they were a person, however evil or misguided, with potential, however unfulfilled, someone's son/brother/etc. who might mourn for them, while in contrast garbage never was that nor could have been.
Their value *to me*? Might be nothing, less than nothing (at least "nothing" is inoffensive), actively harmful. This was their failing, in the case of the kitten-torturer child-murderer above, Hitler, etc. Their failing; I am sorry they made those choices.
While I recognize their failing, I don't use it as an occasion to also fail, and lower my behavior closer to theirs, by not showing basic respect.
A not-so-silly example: When my dad passed away, I called my half-sister in another state to let her know that our father had died. I didn't reach her, but I did reach her mother (who was our dad's ex-wife, divorced for many years from him). When I told her why I was looking for my sister, her reaction was "Well, good! I'm glad *he's* finally dead." She was to my surprise able to pass at least some of this venom on as my sister did not attend our dad's funeral.
Okay, perhaps they had their differences, perhaps in her view he treated her poorly. Whatever. That's still a shitty and cruel thing to say to someone in fresh mourning of a loved one. To her, he was worth garbage. Okay, perhaps so, due to his failings (or hers, or both, or whatever), no problem. But that doesn't account for her being a useless piece of shit in this manner--that's *her* failing.
From my perspective, she subscribes to "your" view, the President probably also does, and I don't.
Not trying to convert you, nor lump your behavior in with hers (far from it), just trying to explain how it looks from over here. respect=due irrespective of actions/decisions. esteem=depends on actions/decisions.
respect != esteem; esteem != respect.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:00PM (8 children)
You're right about McCain being one of the trash-compactor-burial types, but *so is Trump.* If anything Trump is an incinerator-burial case.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:14PM
I don't think trump would really care about the method of burial/disposal -- as long as there was a HUGE crowd.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:17PM (6 children)
Here's the thing. I am not concerned about Trump being unhappy with, angry at, disappointed in, etc., John McCain. None of the concerns I am describing--and that the Trumpers are taking issue with--have anything to do with whether John McCain is a saint or a sinner.
TFA points out Trump having difficulty trying to
(emphasis added).
It's not a problem with McCain being a great guy and a war hero, nor about McCain being reviled and disliked troublemaker. It's about the fact that the President of the United States of America is spiteful and emotionally unsophisticated and petty enough to be, quoting my post above,
The guy is angry that a bunch of people are mourning someone who died, and celebrating his life. That's not (just) disrespect of McCain, but rather, shows active contempt for the thousands of people to whom McCain's passing was seen as a loss.
Look, some people are nice, some are jerks, that's life. But if someone (be they nice or jerk) dies, and others miss them, that's just something that happens and that should be respected even if you didn't personally like or value the dearly departed. Responding to that with anger instead of respect, regardless of the level of give-a-damn about the dearly departed in question, is frankly disturbingly aberrant.
Disturbingly aberrant is a phrase that might be thrown around as hyperbole describing Trump's approach to a lot of things, but here I use the phrase to mean that the behavior is aberrant in a disturbing way, in the literal sense. It's concerning.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:21PM (2 children)
This sort of gets to the heart of some of the worst things about Trump as a person...traits that some people seem to be OK with that leave me absolutely dumbstruck.
That's the fact that nothing he does ever seems to be actually motivated by anything good...compassion, ethics, you name it. Nothing even seems driven by any real ideologies of any kind.The vast majority of everything he does it driven purely by his ego...that accounts for almost all of it. He clearly doesn't believe in the rule of law, but rather in the rule of money and power. God only knows how there are so many asshats out there that think he's somehow some champion of the little guy...though the not so veiled racism is probably a big part of that.
There seem to be people who somehow like the fact that he's an obnoxious asshole...the kind of guy that normal people would smack into next fucking month in normal life. I just don't get it.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 31 2018, @02:24AM (1 child)
That seems both fair and accurate. Now - how about you use that same filter to examine all the other big names in politics? Take the twenty most famous names, and examine them through the filter of ego. It will apply pretty equally in US politics, world politics, or any nation's politics. In many cases, you'll find that the ego has some ideology bolted on, to make the ego less revolting to voters, but the ego remains the driving force.
I'll do one for you: Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was "her TURN". The woman had no solid positions on anything - she "pivoted" daily. In all of her public career, she was never wrong, never even made a mistake. If there was anything that may have looked like a mistake, it was the fault of her underlings. Ego, all the way.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday August 31 2018, @12:59PM
I actually agree when it comes to Hillary...never been a fan. I've literally never seen her talk when it didn't come across as totally scripted politician-speak. Having said that I voted for her over Trump and do believe she'd have been 1000 fold less dangerous than the horror show we've got now.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday August 31 2018, @12:24PM (2 children)
No, the article claims that without supporting evidence.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 31 2018, @12:30PM (1 child)
Your calls for facts, sir, are interfering with my sophistry.
I suppose that's a good thing, though.
I do concur that there is no solid evidence presented that the President had any particular emotional response (sad, happy, rueful, angry, etc.) to the proceedings.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @01:11AM