• John McCain, War Hero And Senate Icon, Dead At 81

    From Internetking@VERT/INETK to all on Sunday, August 26, 2018 23:30:55
    John McCain, War Hero And Senate Icon, Dead At 81

    By Internetking
    August 26, 2018

    Sen. John McCain, a war hero, Senate icon and Republican maverick and
    former presidential nominee, has died.

    By Beth Dalbey, Patch National Staff| Aug 25, 2018 8:26 pm ET | Updated
    Aug 25, 2018 10:28 pm ET

    picture: http://deaf.cx/s

    WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 27: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) laughs during a news conference to announce opposition to the so-called skinny repeal of
    Obamacare at the U.S. Capitol July 27, 2017 in Washington, DC. The
    Republican senators said they would not support any legislation to repeal
    and replace Obamacare unless it included a guarantee to go to conference
    with the House of Representatives. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)



    PHOENIX, AZ — U.S. Sen. John McCain, a no-nonsense Vietnam War hero who confounded political friends and foes alike by intermittently challenging
    and championing Republican Party orthodoxy during more than three decades representing Arizona in the House and Senate, died Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.

    McCain, who was diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of brain
    cancer that had kept him away from the Senate since mid-December, died
    just one day after his family announced he would end his treatment . He
    would have turned 82 on Aug. 29.

    His daughter, Meghan McCain, said in a statement that her father “was a great fire who burned bright, and we lived in his light and warmth for so
    very long.”

    “We know that his flame lives on, in each of us,” she said. “The days and
    years to come will not be the same without my dad — but they will be good days, filled with life and love, because of the example he lived for us.”

    As news of McCain’s passing spread, condolences poured in on social media. President Donald Trump tweeted his “deepest sympathies and respect” to the McCain family and said “our hearts and prayers are with you.” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey citied McCain’s “phenomenal life” and said his death leaves a void “in the heart and soul of our nation.” Former President Barack Obama said few Americans have been tested as McCain was, “or required to show
    the kind of courage that he did. … At John’s best, he showed us what that means.”

    McCain’s absence from the Capitol did not diminish his fiery presence in national politics. In statements and on social media, he often signaled
    his support for Trump but at other times blasted him as a delusional, bellicose sham unworthy of the office.

    One of McCain’s final acts on the Senate floor crystallized his often contentious relationship with the president and hard-line conservative Republicans. It occurred at about 3 a.m. on July 28, 2017, during the
    final vote on a Republican attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. McCain
    had criticized the bill as lacking in bipartisanship but hadn’t said how
    he would vote. With a “yes,” he would kill Obamacare. With a “no,” he would save it.

    When McCain’s name was called for his vote, he was nowhere in sight.

    Then, as the vote was coming to an end, the doors to the Senate chamber
    swung open. McCain strode confidently to the floor. He approached Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and paused. Slowly, McCain raised his arm
    at the clerk to make his vote known. Defiantly, he turned his thumbs down
    as he said, “No.” The bill was dead. Audible gasps filled the chamber. Outside the Capitol, hundreds of pro-Obamacare demonstrators cheered.

    Trump fumed and for months brought up McCain’s vote.

    After 35 years in Congress and almost as long in the Navy, including more
    than five years as a prisoner of war, and battling terminal cancer, McCain
    had earned the right not to care.

    picture: http://deaf.cx/t

    NEW YORK, NY – MAY 22: A new book my Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), titled “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations” sits for sale on a shelf at a Barnes & Noble Bookstore in Manhattan, May 22, 2018 in New York City. Co-authored with longtime aide
    and friend Mark Salter, the candid political memoir goes on sale today.
    The book includes reflections from the 2008 presidential campaign, his
    life in the Senate and his thoughts on current U.S. President Donald
    Trump. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

    Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

    His death comes months after the release of of his new book, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations.” Written from the perspective of a dying man free to speak his mind and
    vote his conscious without fear of voter backlash, the book offers a
    candid assessment of the current state of politics.

    A stage 4 cancer diagnosis “acts as ungentle persuasion,” he wrote.

    “I don’t think I’m free to disregard my constituents’ wishes, far from it,” he wrote. “I don’t feel excused from keeping pledges I made. Nor do I
    wish to harm my party’s prospects. But I do feel a pressing responsibility to give Americans my best judgment.”

    McCAIN ON TRUMP

    In his book, McCain took aim squarely at Trump, saying the 45th president
    is concerned more about the “appearance of toughness” than American values.

    “He has declined to distinguish the actions of our government from the crimes of despotic ones,” McCain wrote. “The appearance of toughness, or a reality show facsimile of toughness, seems to matter more than any of our values.”

    McCain wrote that he’s “not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions.”

    “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 lambasted the president’s 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,” McCain wrote.

    He decried both conservative news hosts and others who use the internet
    “to spread conspiracy theories and calumnies about candidates to people
    with an appetite for that sort of thing or an inability to discern what
    could be true from something spawned in the fever dreams of people who
    should probably seek psychiatric help.”

    “Before I leave,” McCain wrote, “I’d like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations. I would like to see us recover our sense that we
    are more alike than different.”

    Another notable display of his disaffection for the president came in September in a speech he gave accepting he National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal.

    Perhaps mindful of Ronald Reagan’s golden rule never to criticize fellow Republicans, McCain didn’t mention Trump by name but his remarks were
    aimed squarely at the president.

    “To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats
    than solve problems,” McCain said at the time, “is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned
    to the ash heap of history.”

    picture: http://deaf.cx/u

    WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 25: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gives a thumbs up to
    well wishers as he gets into his car at the US Capitol July 25, 2017 in Washington, DC. McCain was recently diagnosed with brain cancer but
    returned on the day the Senate is holding a key procedural vote on U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

    (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

    The remarks were the latest in a long-running feud between McCain and
    Trump, who famously said at a 2016 campaign event in Iowa that McCain was
    not a war hero.

    “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said, sparking a swift rebuke from McCain, who said he should apologize to military service members, especially those who had
    been POWs.

    Trump avoided serving in the Vietnam War through four student deferments
    and one medical one.

    McCain’s status as a war hero helped him blaze onto the political stage in 1982 with the first of two successful runs for the U.S. House of Representatives. With a sharp tongue, bold attitude and military-strength spine, he adapted well to Arizona conservatism and settled into the mold
    of Barry Goldwater, easily winning his Senate seat in 1987 when the conservative patriarch decided to retire.

    McCain ran twice for president, getting his party’s nomination in a 2008 campaign that is largely remembered for his pick for vice president, then Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a choice research shows may have cost him 2
    million votes in what became a Democratic tidal wave.

    MILITARY INFLUENCE EARLY AND FOREVER

    While the military shaped McCain as a child and young man, it would unquestionably define him as an adult and eventual prisoner of war.

    John Sidney McCain III was born Aug. 29, 1936, into a military family at
    the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone. His grandfather, John Sidney McCain Sr., and his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., were both four-star admirals, and the senator’s father eventually led the United States Pacific Command.

    The young John moved from naval base to naval base, both in America and abroad, and graduated from a private preparatory boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1954.

    picture: http://deaf.cx/v

    ARLINGTON, VA – NOVEMBER 14: U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley (R) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) (L) watch a special Twilight Tattoo performance November 14, 2017 at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia. Sen.
    McCain was honored with the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal for over 63 years of dedicated service to the nation and the U.S. Navy. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)



    He followed his father and grandfather into the Naval Academy. Early on, McCain started showing signs of the personality that would eventually seal
    his reputation as a maverick. In the academy, though, he was known more as
    an undisciplined troublemaker who broke rules such as making sure his
    shoes were shined.

    His father paid him several visits to reprimand him over behavioral
    issues.

    McCain graduated four years later, was designated an ensign, and sent to
    the naval base at Pensacola, Florida, to train as a pilot. In 1960, he graduated and was assigned to the U.S.S. Intrepid aircraft carrier,
    followed by a stint aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Both were based out of
    the Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, and both were deployed to the Caribbean and Mediterranean.

    He earned a reputation as a reckless pilot. He was involved in three
    crashes but escaped each time without any serious injury. But in one of
    those incidents, he flew too low in Spain, causing a blackout.

    McCain was serving on the Enterprise when he was promoted to lieutenant in June 1962. Four months later he was on the carrier when it helped enforce
    the blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis.

    JOHN MCCAIN, POW

    On Oct. 26, 1967, during his 23rd mission as a Navy bomber pilot, McCain’s Skyhawk bomb diver was hit by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi. The aircraft’s right wing was destroyed and McCain was ejected from the aircraft, breaking his right leg and both arms and knocking him
    unconscious until he landed in a lake. He sank immediately to the bottom,
    but was able to kick himself to the surface, where he was captured by the North Vietnamese.

    Throughout nearly six years of captivity, more than half of it spent in solitary confinement, McCain was repeatedly tortured. He received minimal
    care for his injuries. He would suffer lingering pain from those injuries throughout his lifetime.

    McCain described the torture in a 2008 first-person account published
    before he won the Republican nomination for president. He was stripped of
    his clothing after North Vietnamese soldiers swam out and pulled him to
    the side of the lake.

    “Of course, this being in the center of town, a huge crowd of people gathered, and they were all hollering and screaming and cursing and
    spitting and kicking at me,” he told U.S. News & World Report. “When they had most of my clothes off, I felt a twinge in my right knee. I sat up and looked at it, and my right foot was resting next to my left knee, just in
    a 90-degree position. I said, ‘My God — my leg!’ That seemed to enrage them — I don’t know why. One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly. Another stuck a bayonet in my foot.
    The mob was really getting up-tight.”

    picture: http://deaf.cx/w

    P368426 04: (File Photo) Senator John Mccain In A Hanoi Hospital During
    The Vietnam War November, 1967. (Photo By Getty Images)

    (File Photo) Senator John Mccain In A Hanoi Hospital During The Vietnam
    War November, 1967. (Photo By Getty Images)

    Some members of the crowd came to his assistance and the torture subsided,
    but he drifted in and out of consciousness for several days after his
    transfer to a North Vietnamese prison camp. His captors continued to beat
    him during interrogations and said medical treatment would be withheld
    until he gave up more information beyond the sparse details he had
    provided — his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

    His captors soon realized he was the son of a decorated admiral and transferred him to a hospital — a filthy, dirty facility where he was fed only spoonfuls of nourishment a day and received treatment he later said nearly killed him. The commander of the North Vietnam prison camps, called
    a CAT, offered to release him.

    From a 2007 Arizona Republic profile:

    McCain realized that the Code of Conduct gave him no choice. [Everett] Alvarez, who was being held elsewhere, was supposed to be the first man released.

    “I just knew it wasn’t the right thing to do,” he said. “I knew that they
    wouldn’t have offered it to me if I hadn’t been the son of an admiral.

    “I just didn’t think it was the honorable thing to do.” … McCain calmly
    told The Cat that the prisoners must be released in the order they were captured, starting with Alvarez.



    In December 1969, McCain was transferred to Hoala Prison — the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” — POW camp, where he spent the final years of his captivity. He and other American POWs were released on March 14, 1973,
    less than two months after the Vietnam ceasefire went into effect.

    He was celebrated as a hero and quickly gained notoriety when he returned
    to the United States. Getting around on crutches, he was greeted at the
    White House by President Richard Nixon and was invited to dinners by then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan.

    The Navy promoted him to commander, and he spent a year at the National
    War College, where he studied the war and his captivity. He came to the conclusion that the war had been poorly run and gained notoriety when he
    spoke out in support of the rights of anti-war protesters and those who
    had fled the United States to evade the draft.

    Having recuperated from his injuries, he was able to regain his status as
    a pilot and was assigned to a training squadron at the Naval Station in Jacksonville, Florida. Within two years, he was promoted first to
    executive officer and then commander of the squadron.

    While his promotion to lead what was then the Navy’s largest air squadron earned him resentment, McCain worked hard to show that he deserved it. He
    also gained notice by boosting morale and ensuring that female officers be treated with respect.

    ‘MAVERICK’ WHO STUCK TO PRINCIPLES

    In 1976, he was assigned as the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, his
    first foray into politics. After two terms in the U.S. House, McCain ran
    in 1986 for the Senate seat vacated by Goldwater and has held that
    position since. The popular young politician’s endorsement was highly
    sought by Republicans seeking the 1988 presidential nomination, which eventually went to George H.W. Bush.

    McCain was widely speculated to be on the short list for vice president
    until his bright, rising star faded with the “Keating Five” scandal.

    The scandal got its name from one of McCain’s top donors, wealthy
    financier Charles Keating, who reportedly encouraged McCain and four other Republican senators to pressure federal thrift regulators to back off
    Lincoln Savings & Loan, which Keating ran. Lincoln collapsed, costing taxpayers more than $3.4 billion, and Keating was charged with 42 counts
    of fraud.

    McCain was exonerated in Senate Ethics Committee hearings and largely put
    the scandal behind him, going on to win five more terms in the Senate.

    As a freshman member of the U.S. House, McCain began honing his reputation
    as a maverick for disagreeing with his party on certain issues. He called
    for complete withdrawal of U.S. Marines from Lebanon in 1983, standing up
    to President Reagan, saying at the time that he did not see any attainable objectives and that the longer the U.S. maintained a presence there, the harder it would be to get out. In an Oct. 23, 1983, suicide attack at
    Marine headquarters in Beirut, 241 U.S. service members were killed.

    picture: http://deaf.cx/x

    WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 14: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) (L) talks with reporters before heading into the Senate chamber to vote against cloture
    on the confirmation of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) to be the next
    Secretary of State at the U.S. Capitol February 14, 2013 in Washington,
    DC. Senators voted 58-40 against ending debate on the confirmation of
    Hagel, stalling his approval for another day or possibly a week. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

    (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

    He also went against his party in 2001 when he teamed with Democratic Sen. Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin to pass major campaign finance reform legislation that banned unrestricted “soft money” contributions to political parties.

    McCain was a member of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group of senators who were able to negotiate a compromise in 2005 to stop his party from deploying the “nuclear option” to end an organized filibuster by Democrats over judicial nominations.

    He was a frequent critic of The Pentagon during the Iraq War, saying in
    2004 that he had “no confidence” in the leadership of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over his refusal to deploy more troops.

    He supported President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election bid, though differing with him on torture, pork barrel spending, illegal
    administration, a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and climate change. At the same time, he defended Bush’s opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, whose Vietnam War record had come under attack
    during the campaign.

    In his final term and emboldened by the cancer diagnosis, the
    once-tortured prisoner of war raised alarm about Trump’s choice to lead
    the CIA, questioning nominee Gina Haspel’s role in the torture of
    detainees held in U.S. custody after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
    attacks, which he called “one of the darkest chapters in American history.”

    MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE

    McCain was married twice, first to runway model Carol Shepp in 1965. He adopted her two sons, Douglas and Andrew, and the couple had a daughter, Sidney.

    When he returned from Vietnam, he hadn’t seen his wife in six years.
    During the time he was held captive in Vietnam, she was severely injured
    in an automobile accident and they went through physical therapy together
    upon his return home.

    Their marriage lasted another seven years before ending in divorce in 1980
    in what McCain has called his “greatest moral failure.” He admitted to extramarital affairs, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song,” which details their seemingly storybook marriage.

    picture: http://deaf.cx/y

    PHOENIX, AZ – NOVEMBER 2: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) (L) speaks to the crowd with his wife Cindy McCain (R) and daughters Meghan McCain (2R) and
    Bridget McCain during an Arizona Republican Party election night event at
    the Hyatt Regency November 2, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona. McCain easily
    defeated his opponent Democratic candidate Rodney Glassman. (Photo by
    Laura Segall/Getty Images)

    (Photo by Laura Segall/Getty Images)

    But both had changed during their long time apart.

    “The breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or
    any of those things,” Carol told Timberg. “I don’t know that it might not
    have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John
    turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else.”

    In 1979, he met Cindy Hensley at a military reception in Hawaii. In “Worth Fighting For,” his 2002 book, McCain described her as “lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident.” By the end of the evening, “I was in love,” he wrote.

    They had three children, Meghan, Jack and Jimmy, and adopted another
    child, Bridget, from Bangladesh.

    Patch’s Colin Miner contributed to this report.

    Featured Photo: File by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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    On 08-26-18 23:30, Internetking wrote to all <=-

    @VIA: VERT/INETK
    John McCain, War Hero And Senate Icon, Dead At 81

    A loss to US politics.


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