JOHN MCCAIN A ‘WAR HERO?’ NOT SO MUCH!!!

First let me start by saying that I did not go to Vietnam.  My number was 342 in the draft lottery, the only lottery that I view myself as ever having won.  I did, however lose a friend in the war, as many of us no doubt did.  Those who chose to go, or those who were drafted, came back in flag draped coffin or with nightmares I’m sure they suffer to this day.  I doubt any came back as the same person they were upon their arrival to the war zone.  And then you also had those men who were captured as well as those who were able to finagle for themselves a shorter than average tour while garnering more than a few medals for themselves along the way.

My focus here will be on one of those men who were captured and who, upon his release from captivity, would be sent home where he, after eventually leaving active duty would go on to enjoy, courtesy of a manufactured reputation as a war hero, a successful, and very lucrative, career in the U.S. Senate.  And it’s this very same man who, to this day, still fancies himself a ‘war hero’ for doing little more than to get himself shot down over enemy territory.  A man who retired from the Navy in 1981 with plans to run for Congress, and who would go on to be elected to the Senate in 1987, succeeding a man seen by many as a true conservative, Barry Goldwater.

And I say true conservative because it has been over the course of this man’s 30 year tenure as a senator that he has gradually moved further and further to the left, and who has now decided, as he is on his way out, to take things to a more personal level with a president that many in the ‘Republican Establishment’, of which this man is one, don’t particularly care for.  And his willingness to do so reveals just how shallow of an individual he really is, and demonstrates that he would rather attempt what he views as being revenge than to take the high road and do what would be in the best interest of the American people.  Are these actions the actions of a war hero?    

All of which finally brings me to the man of whom I speak, John McCain, who appeared to take a shot at President Trump in a recent interview about the Vietnam War by criticizing draft deferments granted disproportionately to the wealthy.  It was during an interview that aired on C-SPAN 3 just this past Sunday that McCain said, “One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never, ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest level would get a doctor to say they had a bone spur.”  And he went on to say, “That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”

Apparently what remains to not sit well with McCain is the fact that Trump received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War.  Four were granted because Trump was in college.  But the last deferment, in 1968, was because Trump was diagnosed with a bone spur in the heel of his foot.  Now perhaps Trump did take advantage of his wealth, or maybe he didn’t, but McCain’s accusations ring a little hollow in that McCain obviously wasn’t above taking advantage of the fact that both his father and grandfather were Admirals to gain for himself a leg up on his competition.  So might this be little more than the pot calling the kettle black?

McCain was a naval aviator who flew nearly two dozen missions during the Vietnam War before his final mission, in Oct. 1967, ended when he was shot down over Hanoi.  He was held in North Vietnamese prisons until March of 1973.  And it would only be much later that word would leak out how his fellow prisoner of war mates actually nicknamed him "Songbird McCain!"  The Vietnam War has been invoked before in a long-simmering battle between Trump and McCain.  In July 2015, just after Trump declared his candidacy for president, Trump denied that McCain is a war hero.  And I think, if we’re being honest, then-candidate Trump was pretty close to being right.

And it was again in just the last week that McCain once again chose to venture back onto the rhetorical battlefield with now President Trump, criticizing “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”  McCain’s remarks, made during a speech in which McCain accepted the Liberty Medal, were seen as a direct repudiation of Trump.  Responding to McCain’s remarks the next day, President Trump said in a radio interview that “people have to be careful because at some point I fight back.”  McCain would go on to make his thinly-veiled dig at Trump’s deferment in an interview the following day.

And while ‘war hero’ McCain continues to spend a great deal of his time going out of his way trying to trash Trump, he does everything within his power to make sure that he was able to grind to a halt the most recent attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare while he himself has received, and continues to receive, nothing short of top notch medical treatment because members of Congress made themselves exempt from what us common folk are subjected to and, of course, because he has money.  And also I have yet to hear whether he intends to support the tax cuts that benefit many of us in the middle class, or if he will again act as spoiler on that issue as well.

Being no true hero, it’s like so many others in the ‘Republican Establishment’ that McCain suffers from Acute Trump Derangement Syndrome as well as his brain cancer.  McCain is Despicable, Absolutely Pathetic and Contemptible.  He constantly betrays the very people who he is supposed to represent.  Being filled with so much hate is not a good condition for the soul of someone facing death.  McCain long ago became little more than a disgrace and an embarrassment to Arizona as well as to the nation.  As a Soros stooge and a globalist he is ‘THE’ poster child for “term limits”.  And he is someone who personifies the ‘Swamp’ that is so urgently in need of being drained.

John Kerry-Heinz is another loser from the Vietnam era who has tried and failed to wear the ‘hero’ moniker.  He served for four months and used supposed injuries that were for the most part self-inflicted as a way to garner some medals for himself and to be sent home.  Then he goes before Congress and lies about our troops, essentially selling them out.  John Kerry-Heinz’s legacy is one that has him being honored by the very communists the U.S. was fighting, and for helping them win the war.  That too is not the behavior of a hero, but it is likely why Obummer chose him to be his Secretary of State, since Kerry-Heinz hates America as much as Obummer.  But then, I digress.

Anyway, it was during his last reelection campaign that McCain ran as being a leader in bringing about the end of Obamacare. But of course that was when everyone was so sure that the next president was going to be Hitlery.  So instead McCain chose to save it.  McCain is one of the major reasons that the majority of people no longer trust politicians to do the right thing.  He always manages to do the wrong thing whether we‘re talking about Obamacare, illegal immigration/the border, or nearly any other issue that is important to those of us who identify as conservatives.  McCain has never really been the guy that he’s always portrayed himself as being.  Far from it.

And if you doubt that, it’s according to Col. Ted Guy, John McCain’s commander as a POW, that McCain was known to have collaborated with the enemy and also has been accused of doing the following:

1.  McCain is accused of giving information that led to the downing of 60 U.S. aircraft.

2.  McCain is accused of training North Vietnamese air defense personnel.

3.  McCain is accused of making over 30 propaganda broadcasts against the US, broadcasts he moved to have classified when he was elected to the Senate.

Our government never officially briefed our returning POWs about the egregious violations of the Paris Peace Accords, by both Hanoi and Washington DC.  Washington refused to pay the $4.25 Billion President Nixon secretly promised in a February 1, 1973 letter to Premier Pham Van Dong and Hanoi failed to release the other group of 600 US POWs they were holding as an insurance policy against these funds.  And had the truth been told to our returning heroes, they would have undoubtedly led the charge for the return of their comrades.  Instead they were sent out to America's heartland as the war heroes we so desperately needed, McCain and Ted Guy included.

But Guy, as he began to read the new revelations that began surfacing in the 1980’s, had by 1991, seen enough.  By then he realized that he had been lied to, and that we had knowingly left men behind.  And it was with other former POWs that he went around DC trying to get the government to reverse policy and negotiate for those still being held in Vietnam and Laos.  It was then that McCain entered into the picture and as more new information surfaced showing that indeed we had left men behind, McCain began a long and rather vicious campaign to discredit and shoot down any new information or anyone advocating that the truth about our POWs be made public. 

And yet this is the man that so many still refer to today as being a ‘war hero’.  This is a man who continues to put his petty political disagreements with the president above the needs of the American people, many of whom still look upon him as a bona fide war hero.  While he may have had the best of intentions when first elected, somehow I doubt it.  Either way he has become little more than a very vindictive old man, who long ago ceased being someone worthy of anyone’s respect.  And it’s sad that the people of Arizona were unable to recognize that fact and sadder still that the only way we will finally come to be rid of John McCain is when he dies.