Before We Enshrine Senator McCain

A Murray Sabrin letter to the editor of NorthJersey.com:

Regarding “McCain, Trump:  Two faces of America—hero, huckster,” (Other Views, July 28):

Mr. Doblin, editorial page editor, called Sen. McCain a “valiant warrior of the U.S. Senate” who endured several years of captivity as a Vietnam War POW and is now battling brain cancer.  Before we enshrine Senator McCain as a “national treasure,” let’s look at his record as a naval officer and senator.

John McCain, son and grandson of Navy admirals, was responsible, according to witnesses, for the deaths of 134 crewmen on the USS Forrestal when he “wet started” his fighter jet—which led to a huge explosion and fireball, after which he was quickly helicoptered off the aircraft.

In Vietnam McCain dropped bombs on Hanoi killing an untold number of innocent men, women and children who were no threat to the American people.  If anything, McCain was a war criminal for violating the Geneva Convention.

As a U.S. Senator McCain was a member of the bipartisan “Keating Five”—senators who were charged with corruption in one of the biggest S&L scandals of the late 1980s.  The evidence was so compelling one Arizona columnist at the time called him “the most reprehensible of the Keating Five.”

Senator McCain has been an unapologetic supporter of the Iraq War and a belligerent American foreign policy that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the past several decades. He has been a leading proponent of regime change around the world.  He has survived politically for so long because he is a reliable defender of America’s welfare-warfare state that is bankrupting the country.  And, of course, he divorced his wife after she was badly injured after an automobile accident.  Some hero