Most Days McCain Is Drinking A Tall Glass Of Absolut Elyx On Ice

I hope McCain just keeps hanging on and on and on and one day the Trump klan can to decide if they will invite him to Señor T's funeral or not. "See the world as it is, with all its corruption and cruelty, and believe it is worth fighting for anyway, even dying for," he told the NY Times Sunday. "No just cause is futile, even if it's lost, if it helps make the future better than the past" I wish McCain had been as independent in the Senate as the legend he's always cultivated was. But he seems to be trying to make up for it in his final days or hours. Biden, who made his way out to visit McCain, told The Times that "John knows he's in a very, very, very precarious situation, and yet he's still concerned about the state of the country [and] alked about how our international reputation is being damaged and we talked about the need for people to stand up and speak out."

It's been reported that McCain doesn't want Trump at his funeral and that Obama and Bush have been asked to do eulogies. (Pence gets to represent the Regime.) McCain would like his wife Cindy to get his seat in the Senate, an extremely unAmerican idea.

McCain has a new book, The Restless Wave coming out to correspond with his funeral. In it he finally admits he was wrong to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate and wishes he had picked someone almost as hideous, Joe Lieberman. His advisors had told him Lieberman's pro-Choice position would make him unacceptable to Republican voters and McCain dug up Palin. He wrote in the book that the Lieberman analysis "was sound advice that I could reason for myself. But my gut told me to ignore it and I wish I had.

"She was a popular, energetic and accomplished reformer as mayor, governor and as a campaigner," McCain writes. He also thought she would appeal to Democrats who had preferred Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama in that year's primaries. McCain notes her knockout speech at the party convention, but he admits it was downhill thereafter.

"She stumbled in some interviews," McCain relates, "and had a few misjudgments in the glare of the ceaseless spotlight. Those missteps too are on me. She didn't put herself on the ticket. I did."

...He also devotes substantial space to the struggle he now sees defining U.S. foreign policy, which is the struggle against Russia-- particularly against Russian President Vladimir Putin. He reminds us of his personal duels with Putin, who once said McCain had been driven mad by his years as a captive "kept in a pit" in Vietnam.

Here is where McCain finally gets serious about talking about the current U.S. president, who rates only passing mentions in the first 270 pages (there are roughly twice as many mentions of Putin). But what thoughts he does give to Donald Trump are troubled.

"I'm not sure what to make of President Trump's convictions," he writes, adding later, "He threatened to deliberately kill the spouses and children of terrorists, implying that an atrocity of that magnitude would show the world America's toughness."

He also has no use for the Trump stance on refugees. "The way he speaks about them is appalling, as though welfare or terrorism were the only purposes they could have in coming to our country."

And: "His reaction to unflattering news stories, calling them 'fake news' whether they're credible or not, is copied by autocrats who want to discredit and control a free press."

Most of all, he is disturbed at what he sees as Trump's tolerance of Putin, implying moral equivalence when Trump said, "We have a lot of killers too." McCain responds: "It was a shameful thing to say, and so unaware of reality."

McCain also makes repeated reference to Putin's attacks on American democracy through the Internet, which he calls Putin's revenge on Hillary Clinton for supporting popular protests against the regime in Russia: "[Putin] would seek revenge ... by ordering his trolls and hackers and subcontractors at WikiLeaks to help defeat her."

Another foreign policy issue especially salient for McCain regards torture and its use by the U.S. in the war on terrorism. He examines the efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration of President George W. Bush to overcome McCain's opposition to anti-terrorism tactics he regarded as torture. Drawing on his hellish experiences in Vietnam as a torture victim, McCain explains why torture is likely to produce misleading or faulty intelligence. But his real point is that torture betrays the American ideals for which he and countless others have risked or sacrificed their lives.

At one point, McCain quotes a letter he received from an Army captain who was disturbed at reports of the U.S. using torture on suspected terrorists. The captain writes, "I would rather die fighting than give up the smallest part of the idea that is America." And McCain adds, "If there is a finer declaration of an American duty and sense of honor, I haven't heard it."