I now knows a 2nd person uninvited to John McCain’s funeral, Sarah Louise Heath Palin:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has reportedly not been invited to attend funeral services for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), her onetime running mate.
NBC News reported Wednesday that Palin had not been invited. A source within the Palin family told NBC News that “out of respect to Senator McCain and his family we have nothing to add at this point.”
I know that this should not amuse me so much, but it does.
The editors are at Rolling Stone are sadists, so they assigned Matt Taibbi to do a review of the new HBO hagiography of Senator John Sidney McCain III’s life, and he is brilliant and savage:
I hope my editors boil in oil in the afterlife for asking me to review John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, the new HBO doc that premieres Memorial Day and stars David Brooks, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and a succession of other wax-museum escapees who line up to evade and prevaricate about things McCain-related and not.
The review copy might as well have been titled, Go Ahead, Say Something Bad About a Terminal Cancer Patient. I felt like a monster 20 seconds in.
It is a beautiful take-down, with quotes like this:
So McCain brought in Sarah Palin, who was a hell of a change, all right, with the IQ of a cheese-wheel – she made Dan Quayle sound like Spinoza. McCain’s campaign was cooked from that moment, because as the months passed, he couldn’t conceal his growing contempt for his own decision, leading to a fracture within the party that has persisted to this day.
This review is a thing of beauty, and you need to read the whole thing.
John McCain is planning his funeral, which is probably sensible, given that the prognosis for glioblastoma is NOT good.
McCain has made it clear that he does not want Donald Trump at his funeral, and the right wing twittersphere has erupted into major butthurt.
I’m not a fan of John McCain. I think that he’s one of the most overrated politicians in America.
That being said, it’s literally his funeral. These delicate snowflakes need to shut the f%$# up.
So, Donald Trump has fired Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State (via Twitter, no less) and announced his intent to replace him with current CIA head Mike Pompeo.
This is not a shock, it’s been telegraphed for a while, and it is a not an outrage.
What is an outrage is who has been named to replace Pompeo at the CIA, Gina Haspel, the inspiration for the main character in the Leni Riefenstahl Kathryn Bigelow film Zero Dark Thirty, who ran the CIA torture camp in Thialand, and then destroyed evidence to evade Congressional oversight:
Donald Trump’s pick for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, reportedly oversaw a black site prison in Thailand where terrorism suspects were tortured. She briefly ran the prison in 2002, anonymous officials told the Associated Press.
Deputy CIA director could face court deposition over post-9/11 role in torture
If the US Senate confirms Haspel, she would be the first female director of the agency, but the historic significance of her nomination was immediately overshadowed by her reported link to the black site, where two suspected al-Qaida members were waterboarded.
“The fact that she’s been able to stay in the agency, rise in the agency and now is in line to be director should be deeply troubling,” Larry Siems, author of the Torture Report, a book analysing government documents relating to Bush-era torture released in 2014, told the Guardian.
Haspel also drafted a cable ordering the destruction of CIA interrogation videos in 2005.
A US justice department investigation into the tapes’ destruction ended without charges, but the event helped spark a landmark investigation into US detentions and interrogations.
Christopher Anders, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, claimed Haspel “was up to her eyeballs in torture”.
Anders urged the CIA to declassify her torture record before the Senate considers her nomination.
She has been described as having, “Ran a laboratory for torture.”
This crap has me agreeing with John Sidney McCain III, who has described her as a representing, “One of the darkest chapters in American history,” which is a complete mind f%$# to me.
While we are at it, it should be noted that German prosecutors are considering issuing an arrest warrant against Haspel for her torture.
Once again, the world has exceeded my already blindingly low expectations.
She should be in jail, but Obama decided, in defiance of signed treaties, to prosecute any of the torturers.
Thanks, Obama.
It appears that some people are suggesting that John McCain voted for allowing the motion to proceed before voting against the actual motion as some some sort of political Jujitsu.Let’s be clear: McCain is neither intelligent enough to come up with this, and he is far to vain and chatty to keep his mouth shut for the requisite 24 hours of so to make it work.
He did this, because he was upset that people were calling him out on the “straight shooter” myth that he has cultivated his entire political career, and I believe that acted in this manner because of his own self regard.
But in the interest fairness, I will quote the theory: (%$# mine)
I’m not sure if it’s really being appreciated just how comprehensively the Republicans were just f%$#ed over.
See, the Republicans have been trying to pass these godawful healthcare bills through a process called budget reconciliation, which, among other things, protects the bill from being filibustered in the Senate and only requires a simple majority of 50 votes (rather than 60, which the Republicans don’t have).
The thing is, the Senate can only consider one budget reconciliation bill per topic per year. Of course, if the bill dies in committee and never comes to an official vote, it doesn’t count- which is why they’ve been able to keep hammering away at the issue.
This bill, though, was allowed to come to the Senate floor, because the Republicans thought they’d secured the votes. Collins, Murkowski and the Democrats would vote no, everyone else would vote yes, and Pence would break the tie. And then McCain completely f%$#ed them. And it was almost certainly a calculated move; he voted to allow the bill to come to the floor. Had McCain allowed it to die in committee, McConnell could have come back with yet another repeal bill; but he let it come to a vote, and now they can’t consider another budget reconciliation bill for the rest of the fiscal year. The Senate needs 60 votes to pass any kind of healthcare reform now.
So now they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they concede defeat on the issue and try again later (causing a big, unpopular stink that could damage elections if they try it before the midterms, or risking losing the slim majority they already have if they wait) or they actually sit down with the democrats like adults and write a halfway decent healthcare bill.
This is amazing.
While I admit that his actions MAY have had the stated effect, I think that was a happy accident.
Simply put, this is not how John McCain plays the game.
Also, the idea that McConnell gives a flying f%$# about Senate procedure, and won’t wreck 200+ years of dysfunction tradition to get his way is simply delusional.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
This is vile. John McCain was never anyone’s white knight. This is the man who ushered in the age of troll candidacies by tapping Sarah Palin as his running mate. This is the man who caved to Donald Trump even after Trump had the audacity to mock his time as a POW. This is the man who called his own wife a c%$# in public. This is a man who has spent all this time acting as if all the Bad Republicans were forcing him to go along with their nefarious deeds while voting in lockstep with them. He is not a reluctant Republican. He’s a sh%$bag, same as the rest of them.
—Drew Magary at GQ
(%$# mine)
The long-simmering war between Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul boiled over on Wednesday when the Arizona lawmaker directly accused his colleague of working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While speaking from the Senate floor in support of a bill advancing Montenegro’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), McCain noted objection from his Kentucky colleague, saying that if you oppose the measure, “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin… trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject an attempted coup.”
McCain continued: “If they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin and I do not say that lightly.”
Several moments later, after the 80-year-old senator asked for unanimous consent to move the bill forward, Paul took the mic to raise his objection before dramatically exiting the room.
In response, McCain began railing against Paul, his voice trembling with anger: “I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number—perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues—would come to the floor and object and walk away.”
He then directly connected Paul to the Russian government: “The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians.
“So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”
Rather unsurprisingly, the Mitch McConnell chose not to cite Senate Rule XIX, which says in part, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator,” because it’s OK if you are a Republican to accuse your colleague of being a Russian mole, but it’s somehow wrong to quote Coretta Scott King from the Senate record in a debate if you are a Democrat.
One of the truisms of the DC political scene is that John McCain thinks that he should be President, and that whoever has become President had better listen to him, or he will throw a tantrum and hold his breath until he passes out.*
The press, largely because of McCain’s tradition of giving them booze and palling around with them, seems to think that this is “Mavericky”, but it appears to be an exercise in arrested development to me.
Case in point, the overcooked potato from the state of Arizona is trying to dictate Russia policy:
Sen. John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent his first shot across the bow of President-elect Donald Trump’s national security plans Tuesday, saying that any attempt to “reset” relations with Russia is unacceptable.
“With the U.S. presidential transition underway, Vladimir Putin has said in recent days that he wants to improve relations with the United States,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement released by his office.
It’s really depressing what qualifies as an elder statesman in DC.
*No sh%$. At age 2, the only way that his parents could get him to stop was to put him in an bathtub full of cold water.