I remain of the view that the National Cathedral, the innocent enlisted men in the armed services summoned for active duty there, the acolytes and the choristers, the Cross and its residual neutrality were grotesquely, vulgarly exploited for political purposes in this ceremony of institutional mourning. Leave aside, that McCain was egotism per se, in office; leave aside, that he ran a filthy campaign against the former President, save for one ostentatious moment of repressive tolerance, of the African-American as a "good family man." Leave all of that aside, and marvel that the most degenerate human being ever to hold the Presidency looked positively spiffy, to take the day on the golf course.
Start the mourning when you know what counts.
6
A negative take on pro- American truths, including past bi- partisanship, honored at the funeral.
1
Its no longer about detesting Donald Trump as disgusting a person as he is. It is about protecting the rule of law which is the foundation of our democracy and which trump threatens with his attacks on the DOJ and our courts. But the real problem is that republicans do not see this as a problem. Corruption and subverting justice have become the norm for them and the policies they seek warrant any action. But what will we have left when the dust settles and we are left with nothing but a husk and a dark tyranny?
4
"... nothing he's done so far has been as destructive as the Iraq war." Really, Ms. Goldberg?
I have rarely taken issue with your views or your words, but this is beyond the pale - because Trump's corrosive effect on the body politic (and by this I mean society as a whole, its heart and guts and brain, not just its political limbs) has reached far beyond American borders. Destroying civility, fomenting fear, and gas-lighting an entire populace is certainly much more damaging.
1
Dying well is the best revenge against the reckless, careless unmaking of America.
2
Beautifully written. Thank you.
3
No average American is missing the bipartisan establishment that conspired to send several million manufacturing jobs to be done by our still arch enemy China (that the working and middle class will die by the millions fighting soon) and we do not miss those same traitors who flooded the USA with 10's of millions of desperate immigrants in defiance of the majority will to kill wages for what jobs remain so that the business advertisers and family friends of the editors of the NY Times and its stable of 1% journalists could double their gluttonous share of our nation's wealth.
5
5 mins after Obama called for a return to “civility”, the Dems and their media mouthpieces were back to bashing POTUS.
The McCain funeral was a the final gathering of the globalist elites. Good riddance to them all.
4
Take the Statue of Liberty apart. Sell them at an auction to pay for the wall. The hand and torch would make a beautiful fountain at Mar-a-Lago.
4
France called, they want the Statue returned.
6
There is no one in American political life who is as bad as or worse than Donald Trump although the Republican Party holds some strong runners up. And, while "the old establishment" aligns itself with Trump to promote its policies, it did not create Trump. An uneducated, media-obsessed minority created Trump's presidency with the help of an antiquated system that gives the least populated areas of our country exaggerated political power over those of us who live in urban settings. Glenn Greenwald doesn't like America and doesn't choose to live here. Can we please stop giving him any credibility as an American voice from the left? He is nothing more than a dyspeptic gadfly.
2
The funeral mourned the death of not just McCain but the globalist pretenses that he and the assembled bipartisan elites championed for the last half century.
These pretenses were that the US and the world would benefit from a global free trade regime backed up by our military and our finance capitalism, both of which were used aggressively across the world to advance the free trade/free markets agenda.
In parallel, America and its western allies opened their borders to mass immigration from the non-western world, including tens of millions of uneducated immigrants who had little in common with or respect for the West's historical culture and values.
Along with a massive reduction in poverty across Asia and the collapse of Communism, these policies have caused:
- the near-total destruction of the industrial working class of the US and W. Europe;
- levels of inequality not seen in the West since the early days of capitalism;
- crony capitalism and concentration, with levels of corruption not seen in 100 years;
- 17 years of continuous war, fought by the US and its allies on fronts spanning half the planet, with tens of thousands of our soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands maimed;
- the degradation of public services and social provision due to tsunamis of unskilled, uneducated immigrants;
- collapsing democratic consensus and public disgust with arrogant, foolish elites and their cynical identity politics.
Globalist agenda, R.I.P.
And good riddance.
3
@T-Bone Excellent.
3
I see comments here that are so caught up in the "Hero" show at the funeral that I have to say John McCain lacked the guts to become an independent. He embraced Sarah Palin who wasn't one iota more qualified than Donald Trump. He served his country in the war and suffered greatly, but also killed a lot of innocent people on the ground to put it in bluntly. And as for the glory days of the Republican Party, when I marched against the war in Vietnam, the country was plenty screwed up then- even my parents, strict as they were with us at home, were horrified with the injustice. The John Birch Society had it in for minorities, and William F, Buckley was happily putting down anything that looked like an egalitarian society. The rich were ALWAYS right, weren't they? Don't fall for the "Great Society" under LBJ- a little bit of relief to correct 300 years of racism and abject poverty. A lot of white folks needed the money, too, and better schools, and better jobs. But no sooner than MLK laid down his life for a brighter day for Everyone than the REAL American dream was turned upside down by Reaganomics. His "great vision"- fire skilled workers like air traffic controllers for striking; conduct an illegal war and lie about it. I want the America I was told to love, but working folks need to unite together and show that WE are the Real Heroes, each of us
are indispensable, realize our value to society, and put that great society vision as our national goal again.
8
This is another beautifully written column by Ms Goldberg.... It's not hard to understand what's going on And she says it herself " Trump is a grotesque individual ". I have said this in many of my comments. All of our Presidents & their families, at least in my lifetime, seemed like decent people. Trump is not. I believe he has evil in his heart... Their policies may have been horrible and very misquided, Reagan - Central America, Bush - Iraq, Nixon - bombing Cambodia. But I think they cared about this country. Trump does not. He cares about himself. No other President was personally indebted to another country like Trump is to Russia. He is a traitor. That was never a thought before. No other President was such a classless person. No other President cursed in public, told supporters to beat up people, made fun of special needs people, bragged about grabbing woman, it goes on & on. And most other Presidents had some degree of intelligence. Trump is an idiot, a baffoon... At the opening of the museum when Michelle Obama hugged Bush and he leaned his head on her shoulder, do you think a touching moment like that could ever happen with Trump. No way. ... He is Soulless .. as I said and most everyone knows, he's just not a decent person. He doesn't even know how to be.
5
I am as big a fan of Michelle Goldberg as there is. However even she, rarely mentions people as far left as Glenn Greenwald. In the 1960's, you could watch on TV Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Malcolm X and other intellectuals deeply critical of the flaws in our system, and busting myths of glorification to obscure naked truths about plunder, imperialism, slavery, and deeply entrenched racism.
Now people like the former NYT war correspondent Chris Hedges, who excoriates "American carnage", so to speak from a far left point of view, is forbidden in corporate media. Trump is just the most openly repulsive representative of the Machiavellian-Nietzsche-Ayn Rand superman philosophy.
"I am far better than others, one of the deserving rich elites that should always get as much of a nation's wealth as possible. Once power is ours, morality, law, decency, wealth distribution, fairness, equal opportunity, truth itself, the environment, lives of millions, all will be forsaken for wealth, profit, and power. We will cheat and lie for power and greed."
The far left voices are virtually blacklisted on all MSM. Hiding ugly truths about all of our history is old hat. Honor and caring about everyday Americans vanished from every corporate Dem and GOP politician over 40 years ago.
Michelle is as left as is allowed, and bravo for her hiring.
2
The Cowards at the Cathedral Tour played all the old hits about dignity, integrity and fidelity to, shared, American ideals. Pharisee and money changers entered the temple and told tales of camaraderie, bipartisanship and a sense of humor that has departed from our politics and our culture. The political elite were invited and, once again, Donald Trump didn't make the cut. He is common, he is ignorant, he is arrogant, egotistical, money hungry and broke all the time, a flipper, a philanderer a fake, a flake and a false prophet. I'm not omnipotent but I'm sure there will be more protesters than mourners at his funeral.
4
The “bipartisan” government gave us a $21,000,000,000,000 debt and a $1,500,000,000,000 annual deficit; illegal warfare against dozens of countries; illegal invasion of Iraq; 11,000.000 illegal aliens; and tax policies designed to create an oligarchy and destroy the middle class.
No thanks.
5
Good question:
The Bush-Cheney war that killed many thousands of innocent people based on a CIA lie was "bipartisan".
A clear "abuse of power". Whatever was the "honorable" McCain thinking when he voted for the warmonger's invasion--still in the Hanoi Hilton?
2
Neither Bush nor Obama wouldn’t recognize it if they fell over it and it was labeled with neon lights.
Bush lied us into the stupidest - most illegal - war ever started - Iraq.
Obama rewarded the Wall Street Banksters with bonuses and bailouts, and refused to prosecute them for bankrupting the country.
Then he declared war on law-abiding citizens, abetting millions of illegal aliens invading America, and glorified criminal thugs.
President Trump was lucky not to be invited - the hypocrisy of Bush and Obama speaking about values would be unendurable.
3
Our prior presidents spoke of high ideals, the need to follow our best instincts and always work toward the eloquent promises and great challenges in our Constitution and founding documents. Trump has no such pretensions. It is safe to assume that after a lifetime of making business deals so he could brag about them, promote himself and bed as many women as he could find that Trump doesn't even know of what our highest ideals consist.
His co-author on Trump's best selling book, "The Art of the Deal", Tony Swartz, having spent hundreds of hours in his presence, describes Trump as a sociopath and utterly unconcerned, and unknowing, about right and wrong. A damning indictment.
But it is not Trump alone that represents the deep failure of American democracy and governance. Starting with Newt Gingrich and his politics of search and destroy in the 1980s, we have been going ever lower into raw combat in elections and everything that follows.
Beyond this, the system is flawed, top to bottom. The way candidates are chosen to run for president, the imposition of the Electoral College on the final choice, the rancid river of outside, third party money, the successful effort to roadblock Congress by the radical right, the rise of religious leaders as a virtual political party in their own right, the effort to suppress voting...all of this and more represent a challenge to democracy that, if it unmet, will result in our national downfall. Trump is the warning of what could await.
6
Donald Trump is NOT indifferent to the damage he does this country.
He has to . If he doesn’t the Russian government/oligarchs/mob/Putin (all seem one in the same) call in ONE of the unknown number of still-unpaid loans made to the collective we’ll call the Trump Organization.
The one on which the Trump Organization has leveraged every other loan.
And Putin is holding the lever.
OK, maybe two loans, if DT still has some cash stashed somewhere despite his insane lifestyle and claims to be, I believe, at least an order of magnitude larger than he is.
At that point everything in Trumpworld goes either Chap. 11 or 7, and there’s no money in the Treasury, though the feds have been letting the presses roll nonstop, to bail him out.
I wish Putin would get tired of the madman he placed in power, and los his icy cool a week before Election Day.
As Watergate, exposed more than a month before the ‘72 election proves, even of Mueller releases a detailed report outlining every Trump crime committed to benefit Russia at cost to the US, the people who supported Trump won’ believe.a thing.
Call in one loan and the cards collapse, too late for the Trumpanik candidates to flee.
As for McCabe, that nasty, masochistic war criminal (to the world for violating the Geneva pacts and Napalming civilians, to the Pentagon for refusing to refuse illegal orders to lay down Greek fire upon parties unknown, and, when he flew too low, and shot down, refusing to escape.
He remains dead - stop honoring him
1
It's McCain, not McCabe. At least get the man's name right.
1
And where is the outrage over a self described anti-semite being given one of 4 seats of honor at the Aretha Franklin funeral. What does that say about how the singer chose her friends? And, how come not one person, including Bill Clinton walked off in protest. It seems very clear that a double standard exists for tolerating hate. I for one am profoundly disappointed in the credibility this racist hate monger is achieving.
1
You pessimistic journo-cad...
Our great leader misses American greatness by a country mile every time he thumbs at the rest of us on his keyboard...
And this bipartisanship – sounds like old-time collusion spruced up in Trey Gowdy's newest hairstyle...
(for clarity, think Trey has great bipartisan hair…)
As far as…
“…Other presidents haven’t lived up to transcendent American values of human equality and respect for the rule of law. But every president in living memory professed reverence for these values…
Surely you jest – or are you for-really advocating fake reverence…
If you’re waxing nostalgic for it – that’s another matter…
But – like moon landings and budget and trade surpluses – not going to happen again…
So – get over it…
Besides – no one’s ever going to miss the planting of our flag on lunar soil…
1
I vividly recall that, when Ronald Reagan was president, his liberal opponents vilified him as a warmonger, a reactionary, a racist, a "dumb B-actor" and an "amiable dunce" itching to to set off World War III. Certain pundits (e.g. Garry Wills) yearned for establishment Republicans such as Eisenhower.
When George W Bush was president, his liberal opponents vilified him as a warmonger, a reactionary, a racist, an "idiot" itching to to set off World War III. Certain pundits yearned for establishment Republicans such as ... Ronald Reagan.
When John McCain was nominated as the GOP candidate for president in 2008, his liberal opponents vilified him as a warmonger, a reactionary, a racist, an "emotionally unstable" weirdo itching to to set off World War III. Certain pundits yearned for establishment Republicans such as ... the imagined, hypothetical John McCain of 2000.
After Donald Trump was elected president, his opponents - both "liberal" and "conservative" - vilified him as a warmonger, a reactionary, a racist, an "idiot" itching to to destroy civilization as we know it. Certain pundits yearned for establishment Republicans such as ... JohncCain and George Bush.
Do you people understand, finally, why most Americans won't listen to you cry wolf for the 4th, 5th, 6th or more time?
Your concern trolling won't cut it anymore.
4
I agree with a Michelle Goldberg that Trump is not a patriot, but I would not characterize him as a nationalist, as she does. In my opinion, what he has done is to promote his autocratic vision as nationalism—his brand of nationalism, in which the executive decisions he makes—always in his own self-interest—and the lies he tells to protect himself—are “truth”—and if you disagree, you are not a patriot. For Trump, “L’etat, c’est moi.”
4
Ms. Goldberg hits the Trump nail on the head right here:
"...but it will be uglier still when it (America) doesn’t even try."
Trump wants to convince his supporters that America's basic values and ideals have never been real, just a smoke screen used by the other side, engaged in pure power politics, to dupe his "people." So its time just to finally get it all above board and fight behind the leadership of a strongman.
His brutally cynical view of America mirrors that of the hard identitarian left. They have, for decades, claimed that America and its promises have never been real, merely a brutal spoils system designed by Christian white males to subjugate non-whites. Race and other aspects of identity are Everything. It's all mere tribalism, and time to get on with the whole, wretched thing. (See Pankaj Mishra's recent NYT op-ed for an example of this.)
It is no surprise that Trump's identitarian politics comes at a time when liberal identitarianism has grown so ascendant. They are mirrors of each other. Good people must not succumb to this cynical tribalism, but instead work to bring this country as close to her ideals as possible.
1
Before praising Bush too much, let's not forget the election fraud and Supreme Court decision (2 justices sould have refused themselves) in 2000 which set the stage for more lies.
Lovely speeches are all well and good, but perhaps the greatest way we could honor McCain's legacy would be to get out of Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria and spend our treasure to help our veterans reintegrate into civilian life and live as fully as possible. Those who suffer from physical or emotional wounds should be given the resources they need to function and heal as much as possible, those who need education or training for a new career should get it, and we should think long and hard about going into any other overseas engagements. Honor McCain by honoring our veterans with more than words.
2
Michelle,
This was an insightful column, however, McCain's funeral was overkill by the family, 4 services and the wreath, (with hypocrite Kelly standing there with the wife). It was an opportunity for his daughter to take center stage and rail against a person who was enjoying the attention, Trump!
She kept the drama up all week.
Yes, who knew we'd look back fondly at George Bumbling Bushhead and his 17 year war. And Cheney sitting next to Hilary was rich. The service was compromised by letting Pence, Ryan and McConnell spew untruths and sleight of hand phrases.
And to let Jared and Ivanka sit there?
I wonder how many millions the taxpayers spent on this spectacle. No doubt McCain did brave things in his life, but his voting records shows he's no friend of the American people. The only thing he did that was admirable was the last vote against the repeal of Obamacare. He voted against it the first time, and was a warmonger.
It was overkill because we are starved for people to admire, no matter how flawed.
3
Thank you Michelle......
1
The main take-home point about the Trump Presidency isn't anything to do with him specifically. Instead, it is the implications of a Presidency that is part of the media/digital age---twitter, hacking, trolling, mean-spirited statements that get wide distribution, Facebook, etc.
Just as parents are not really prepared for the massive change in the culture for their children that has occurred in the past 20 years, neither are we ready for what has happened to our country.
Trump is just the result. A SCARY one.
The next one could be worse.
1
FYI. Glenn Greenwald's position is that Trump won because of the collective failures of the political "Establishment" on display at the McCain funeral. No Trump has done nothing nearly as calamitous as Iraq. Or Libya. Or TARP. Or Qualitative Easing. Of course, he hasn't had the opportunity yet. If it makes you feel better to have a bunch of brain dead white guys pretending to care for "freedom" and the "little guy", well good -- that's what these escapist shows are meant to accomplish.
1
After watching McCain's funerals I finally felt some HOPE for our country.
1
What about the fact that every one of the Republicans at that funeral, those complicit with Trump and those slightly less so, are going to vote in lock step to confirm Kavanaugh and imperil who knows what in the future--the lives of women, protections for workers and for the environment--not to mention possibly prevent the reckoning of a criminal president?
Glenn Greenwald is right. And I believe an example of his thinking is contained in the post-election activities of our national Democratic Party which, instead of conducting a genuine, searching autopsy to determine how and what the Democrats did in the campaign allowed Trump defeat Hillary Clinton and how to make important changes to ensure success in the future, chose instead to embrace the dubious - and so far unproven - Russia Gate conspiracy theory to explain everything.
1
@bigbill Considering that Hillary won the popular vote by ~3 million, and lost the EC by a few hundred thousand, I'd say the Democrats did an excellent job in just about everything. Unfortunately, they were no match for Republican voter suppression tactics and the well-oiled right-wing propaganda machine, which took over social media with their lies.
4
@bigbill - Is it not meaningful to you that almost three million more American voters chose Clinton? Or that 89 million American voters stayed home rather than choose between these two candidates? Trump's "victory" was not a product of our democracy, but of our antiquated Electoral College system. We need to address this before it happens again.
3
I once took it for granted that when people on the American left criticized American policy or politics it was implicitly on the grounds that we were not living up to our creed.
Lately I’ve come to believe that is rarely the case nowadays.
So reading this column is just wonderful. It provides a basis for healing our politics if we can also manage to concurrently strive to act like grownups.
1
The Republicans are going to receive a drubbing at the polls over the next two years. And Trump will be gone. I see a new golden era on the horizon.
1
@John R. - I and many Americans hope you are right!
This is way scary. The stakes are serious. Please keep eyes open and write what we desperately need to know.
The most hopeful result of the Trump interregnum will be a renewed, visceral appreciation of the intangible and also concrete elements that comprise American democracy, usually taken for granted, but sorely missed when absent.
4
McCains funeral felt like the funeral of a family member.
The funeral of my generation, my values, passing away.
37
@Betty Landercasper I'm in my 70s and still fighting the good fight. Unless you're older and more disabled than I am, perhaps you're prematurely mourning the death of our generation's values. Please stand up for what's good in this country--I bet you still can. :)
1
Rifting off of GWB's comment - while we have been the carrier of humanity's greatest aspirations, we have also shown an affinity for our worst instincts. Now that a minority of Americans have elected a tyrannical President who celebrates the obscenities of racial, religious and nationalist bigotries, we shall be tested to see whether we will continue to support those values that made us feel so exceptional. If we fail this test, we may well become humanity's greatest threat. The test starts Tuesday, November 6th.
2
The politicians need to remember that they serve all Americans and not just the member of their party, not just those that voted for them.
3
John McCain's death is a reminder of an idealism in American politics and life that's become sadly forlorn. Regardless of whether you agreed with his positions, one could never doubt that he aspired to an ideal now quaint and remote in the present American experience: that one could live for something bigger than one's self. Nope, nothing like that has crossed the mind of America's current President.
If American can only reacquaint itself with the ideals of John McCain only after his demise, then it's a damning indictment of what America has become since Reagan. Americans may not care for Trump, but he's in many ways an accurate reflection of what the USA is in 2018.
2
Ms. Goldberg refers glancingly to the “backlash to this sentimental yearning for a deposed establishmentment.” I wish she had said more about this. Yes, that establishment gave us The American war in Vietnam, not just Richard Nixon’s conspiracy. It also gave us the Iran and Guatemala coups of the 1950s, the dirty wars and dictatorships of Latin America which are the cause of today’s suffering and emigration, the corporate trade deals that undermined worker rights, mass incarceration, the ending of “welfare as we know it”—I could go on but I won’t. If we ever rid ourselves of trump and trumpism,let us NOT return to th corrupt and complacent bipartisonism that was.
1
Of course, it would make sense that the Sitting President attend the funeral of an American Hero. But that American Hero was reviled by that Sitting President repeatedly. And that American Hero knew deep in his soul that the Sitting President would use the opportunity to make a funeral into a campaign rally and pervert the very soul of a gathering of remembrance and celebration of a life. It wasn't small or mean spirited of our American Hero to disinvite the Sitting President. He saved us from watching a Sitting President's hypocrisy. He saved the Sitting President from being called a farce and a sham. And he gave the American people an opportunity to just participate in a state funeral in a dignified and respectful way. McCain wasn't small and bitter, he was wise and had foresight.
2
No disrespect to the deceased and I do admire McCain's limited patriotism, (I say limited as he never supported the Affordable Care Act and his first priority should be to improving the lives of USA citizens first), but why is he considered a hero when he was captured by the enemy and only doing a job he was paid to do. Other un-named people probably put their lives at risk to rescue him and his only fame seems to be that he was from a long linage of military aristocracy. Heroism - no.
1
This train left the station a long time ago. Did bipartisanship end when the Republicans and the Supreme Court stole the Presidency in 2000? Was it when they tried to convict Clinton for not nailing Monica? Or even when Reagan went completely senile in the middle of the 2nd term—which went unreported in the NY Times— and the defacto President was the megalomaniac chief of staff Don Regan? Maybe people who haven't found the whole spectacle ludicrous, sickening and otherworldly can remember. I try but I can't.
Is Trump the worst President ever? Well in terms of technical competence, maybe. Though W could give him a run for his money. And as alluded to above, Reagan was actually senile, according to the late Richard Goodwin, LBJ was possibly clinically paranoid by 1966 and Richard Nixon was probably clinically paranoid from 1962 on.
But one thing I do commend Trump for is unwittingly (his natural state) ripping the veil from the system. It is now quite clear to anyone not hypnotized by cable TV that while the emperor has no clothes, neither does the legislature, the judiciary or the "4th estate."
And sometimes I think that unveiling is the real reason why they hate Trump so much.
3
While I can understand those who find Donald Trump "malevolent" and "grotesque", I don't. He has his faults. (Boy, does he.) But he also has his strengths. Don't underestimate those. I think at heart he is a smart, shrewd man who loves his country.
People honored John McCain for his honor, decency and sacrifice. But do those abstractions really mean anything? He also seemed prickly, petty, ambitious, spiteful and hot-tempered. Most people are complex -- he was likely all of those, and then some.
What kind of man plans four (four!) funerals for himself? What kind of man uses his invitation list to prolong grudges after his life has ended? What kind of man mongers war around the world to impose our views on everyone?
John McCain had his strengths, but he also had his faults. Just like Donald Trump. Judging by legacy, though, I'd say that Donald Trump has accomplished more in 2 years as president than John McCain did in 35 years in Congress. Like it or not, we live in the real world, where abstractions don't mean much.
4
The author of this 'opinion piece' should keep her opinion to herself.
Another commie-liberal-socialist.
She'd be better off in Caracas Venezuela telling her comrades how to live than a democratic republic where the people voted freely and legally for the President.
Is Michelle doesn't like it, she is welcome to leave!
Michelle, the funeral of a "Maverick" called John McCain has shown the contrast between a hero who also was a true American compared to an ugly human being called Trump who has no clue as to what American values Senator McCain always talked about.
Trump, who's built a career degrading and insulting contestants in his talk show, is repeating his acts while sitting in the White House.
He came into political arena first by trying to dehumanize our first Black president Obama by questioning his legitimacy to the throne by calling him a non-American. Even Obama's revealing the original birth certificates didn't convince the son of a racist monster called Fred Trump who might've lynched an unverifiable number of Black and minority folks in his lifetime.
So to the shrinks and psychologists, it is quite obvious that a son of a vicious racist murderer will be another racist murderer.
Just like his father, there is hardly any count of how many tortures and murders of Black and minorities Trump orchestrated in his lifetime.
But even without any evidence we know that Trump is capable of condoning totally racist actions because we've seen him praising the White Supremacists/Nationalists who not only killed an innocent woman but tore up the reputation of a peaceful town in Virginia by starting a pitched battle against the opposing American citizens who didn't like their chanting of Nazi slogans,"Blood and soil" and "Jews won't replace us."
What did Trump say :"They're good people."
What was once a trickle has now become a flood. Time was in distant past when appearances of print journalists on t.v. was the exception , not the rule, now everyone from Times newspaper wants to get in on the action. Go down the list:Peters, Baker, Bruni, Blow, Martin,Krugman, Confessore and now Ms. Goldberg, as if a 6 figure income plus lucrative gigs via Speakers Bureau were not enough. When Harry HELMSLEY, billion dollar real estate tycoon was asked what he wanted in life, his reply was curt, to the point: "more!"Maggie Habberman, wnose articles I liked when she wrote for NY POST, is now slamming the president daily almost as a co host on CNN.Where does 1 draw the line? Do u not find it ironical, Ms.Goldberg, insulting to all the casualties of Iraq war that W. who ordered the invasion, causing deaths of over a million citizens there, 4,000 of our troops plus 50,000 severely wounded, is now lecturing the American people on decency?R u not the one, Ms. Goldberg, who hastily, precociously pre judged FEMA's efforts in P.R.w.o even visiting the island to see for yourself? GR of Fox News did go down , has kin folk there, speaks fluent Spanish, and his reports had credibility.
Michele Goldberg is alluding to something important without stating it directly.
Ceremonial rhetoric (the fancy phrase is “epideictic rhetoric”), famously discussed by Aristotle, is essential to democratic governance. We’re (re)discovering this through our experience with an unprincipled man hell bent on its degradation.
Democracy isn’t just about voting. It’s constituted, brought into being—again and again—by public figures engaged in bringing democracy into being, through ceremonial rhetoric. The American Constitution is itself an example of “epideictic rhetoric.” It constitutes—it brings about—democracy. It is essential to creating it.
Obama was (is) good at it. Even Bush has been OK at it. Its degradation by the present occupant of the White House is a degradation of democracy, no matter by what political party you feel represented. There is—indeed—something that should unite us. It’s words, language, in which human beings swim, like fish swim in water, so goes the phrase.
And it’s not just the present occupant of the White House who’s degrading it, nor particular individuals. It includes the very forms by which we are increasingly communicating. They are undermining democracy.
1
Yep, McCain was so great the NYT lauded him for president. Oh wait.
2
Nike's decision to feature Colin Kapernick in an upcoming ad campaign, gives me some degree of hope. A hope that "We the People" have had enough of the nonsense that masquerades as a president.
Trump has touched a nerve of sensitivity to crass behavior (so very unpresidential) and evoked a terrible and constant outrage that has distracted us from what is right and wrong in policy, and how it is happening.
Who was the worse president, W. Bush or Trump? One of them lied to American people and world, to draw us into a senseless war that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars. One of them allowed our military and security personnel to torture captives in the name of America, for the first time in our nation's history. One of them allowed warrantless surveillance of Americans, in violation of the Bill of Rights. One of them presided over a corrupt financial regulatory regime that inflated a housing bubble and caused a crash that cost millions of people their jobs and homes.
And yet, many Americans look fondly back on the good old days when the President was someone they would like to have a beer with. Someone who paid lip service to democracy and comity, and refrained from being offensive.
Trump is glad to absorb the outrage--all publicity is good. And, while we were busy being offended, Trump's Republican Congress got what they always wanted: a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy. This brought barely a squeak of protest from our activists, who were busy discussing whether Trump paid off Stormy Daniels after extramarital sex or not. Which issue is truly consequential?
The age of outrage is not helping us. It's turning us stupid.
2
The great Chinese poet & essayist So Sik (1937-1101 North Song Dynasty ) wrote to his friend on politics: "The substrate must first starts to rot before the maggots can multiply. Suspicions must first be planted before a person can be libeled & slandered." Wise words indeed.
Long before Trump arrived in Washington DC with the festering swamp creatures, American Democracy has been cracking over the shaky foundation. Yes, it is O.K. to miss it. What's there to miss? Forget about nostalgia. Re-invent the system. Move away from the slave owning era framework.
When Ronald Reagan was president, his enemies in the media called him a warmonger, a fascist, a racist dunce itching to set off WWIII. Liberals such as Garry Wills denounced him for not resembling conservatives from an earlier generation such as Eisenhower.
When George W. Bush was president, his enemies in the media called him a warmonger, a fascist, a racist dunce itching to set off WWIII. Liberals denounced him for not resembling conservatives from an earlier generation such as ... Ronald Reagan.
When Senator John McCain advocated for the surge in Iraq and then when he ran for president with Sarah Palin as his choice for VP, his enemies in the media called him a warmonger, a fascist, an emotionally unstable hothead itching to set off WWIII. Liberals denounced him for not resembling the "maverick" McCain who criticized other conservatives.
After Donald Trump was elected president, his enemies in the media called him a warmonger, a fascist, a racist dunce itching to set off WWIII. Liberals denounced him for not resembling conservatives such as ... George W. Bush and John McCain.
Can you say, "concern troll"?
How can the Times and other journalists who sneered at the surge proposal and who denounced Palin now praise McCain with a straight face?
Do you understand why the media have no credibility with the vast majority of people in this country?
2
While there's no doubt that McCain's service to his country deserved a special tribute, something about the scale of this funeral suggests that we weren't actually mourning the loss of McCain as much as we were mourning the loss of our principles and maybe of our democracy.
7
Republicans have been leading to Trump since Goldwater. Since Gingrich Republicans have depicted Democrats as the enemy not just opponents. Bush did not do that which is one reason why it was easy to see him as a terrible president but not Trumpian.
As for Iraq being the worst thing I am not sure that is correct. Lying as Bush did to get the country into the war and then being incompetent in the conduct of the post war period were two awful things. Getting rid of Saddem, a murderous monster would not have been a terrible plan.
We are in store for an even more disgusting spectacle in the very near future. It will be when President Bone Spurs tweets his fake outrage at football players who kneel during the National Anthem. The not-too-bright yahoos who reflexively support everything their Deal Leader does, will not even register any disconnect between his rhetoric against black football players "disrespecting veterans" and his own petty behavior upon the death and funeral services for a real veteran.
"...a golem composed of America's sins" - Good Grief - Trump even cheats at golf.
1
Remember when the NYT claimed McCain wasn't a citizen because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone? Now he's an American hero to the left because he didn't like Trump. It may have been Mccain's funeral but the words were fixated on someone who wasn't invited.
I haven't seen such shameful behavior at a funeral in my life. Then there was Aretha's memorial.
1
“Trump is a uniquely grotesque individual, but nothing he’s done so far has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War.”
At some level, the above statement is somewhat correct. In fact, part of Trump’s appeal to his base, is his unwillingness to start a war (so far) and his devastating criticism of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War (even as Trump lies about his history of opposing the Iraq War - then again, “Trump lies” is a redundant statement). By in large, the Neocons hate Trump for this reason - and why people like Kristol, Podhoretz, Frum, Stephens, Boot, Rubin are now MSNBC darlings, but no longer welcome on Fox News aka Trump State News. McCain was a Neocon, who supported the Iraq War. While the liberals embrace the Never-Trump Neocons (note that one such Never-Trump Neocon was Bolton, who is now Trump’s National Security Advisor), these Neocons are still supporters of war with Iran, vehemently opposed Iran Nuclear deal, blindly support Netanyahu’s Isreal - an ever increasing ethno-nationalist, theocratic, anti-liberal democracy, anti-minorities, anti-free press/dissent, anti-independent judiciary, anti-academia country - just like Trump’s America. A part of why Greenwald is anti-anti-Trump, along with Greenwald’s complete lack of trust of the American security state - appalled that liberals now defend the CIA/FBI.
However, what truly matters is Trump and Republican climate change denial and inaction - that’s more destructive than the Iraq War.
2
I openly wept at what we have lost and at what we have become.
I read these comments and think: “Hey wait! Donald J Trump wasn’t a Category 5 hurricane who made landfall November 8, 2016. He wasn’t a natural disaster of which we had no control.”
We Americans allowed Trump to take over the White House, the People’s home. 95 million registered voters chose NOT to vote. Our Democratic Party split between an eminently qualified woman who was educated at Smith and Yale Law. Hillary Clinton was FLOTUS. Then voted into serving in the US Senate from NY, and chosen by President Obama to be his Secretary of State.
Her approval rating was in the high 60s when she was defending the State Department and herself from nine or so investigations of Benghazi. She had shown her stamina by flying over a million miles with her position in the State Department. Benghazi wasn’t her fault.
She had fought for the presidency against an elegant, charismatic junior senator from Illinois, but lost to Barack Obama.
For the chance to run as our presidential candidate Mrs. Clinton ran into the buzzsaw campaign of an Independent who had raucous rallies. She never had the aureole of Obama. Who does? Only 15% of citizens aged 18-34 ended up voting. She wasn’t “exciting” to this young electorate.
Every newspaper, including the NY Times, dissed her for her private emails.Dems and the country were “tired of the Clintons.” Bernie Bros refused to nominate then REFUSED to vote for Hillary. 7 million voted 3rd party.
We got the government we deserved! Stop whining!
The McCain ceremony may have soothed Trump opponents, but I doubt it will have any residual impact on the political scene. Does anyone think Trump voters were impressed by Bush and Obama's speeches? Remember, these people despise Obama as much as Trump opponents despise Trump. And Bush is just an obsolete member of the old Republican guard these people gleefully overthrew. While we can take some comfort that the ceremony was a heartfelt tribute to McCain, it did nothing to help with another significant objective... voting Trump out of office.
McCain's passing has been an opportunity for politicians to wax nostalgic about bipartisanship -- as they eulogize McCain the politician most responsible for keeping bipartisanship on life support, especially these past two years of the Trump administration.
Yet, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate arguably accelerated the corrosion of American political culture and opened the door for Trump and Mitch McConnell et al. to finally expurgate "compromise" from the D.C. lexicon.
That Palin was not invited to McCain's memorial services seems to have been intended to not remind the country of McCain's complicity in the fostering the political culture he claims to have abhorred.
That McCain was apparently unwilling to acknowledge his role and responsibility in the degradation of our political culture must be considered when judging his legacy.
1
I find it interesting that you are more offended by Trump than Bush & McCain and the invasion of Iraq & Afghanistan, which has cost 4 to 5 trillion dollars and countless dead to date.
Funny....I would love to know exactly when this "bi partisan" consensus existed. Was it when McCain was being slandered as a racist? Myself, like most of America were appalled by the rank hypocrisy of our political establishment on full display at the memorial service. Politicians from both parties who had no use for the man while alive suddenly used him as a tool to engage in tawdry virtue signalling and took advantage of his death to use it as political bludgeon to attack the current President. In my lifetime there never has been "bi partisan" political consensus.....please do not perpetuate the fairy tale. Maybe the real value McCain is that he reminds us that the nastiness and hypocrisy of our politicians existed well before Trump came down the escalator.
yes many good points in Ms Goldberg's article but what makes me uneasy is that the McCain service was a convocation of the winners of the last 30 years of American life. If we are invoking democracy then where are the rest if us? Whats stirring about the scene on Casablanca is that its the ordinary people of France , beaten and downtrodden, standing up proud and defiant.
1
While I can understand those who find Donald Trump "malevolent" and "grotesque", I don't. He has his faults. (Boy, does he.) But he also has his strengths. Don't underestimate those. I think at heart he is a smart, shrewd man who loves his country.
People honored John McCain for his honor, decency and sacrifice. But do those abstractions really mean anything? He also seemed prickly, petty, ambitious, spiteful and hot-tempered. Most people are complex -- he was likely all of those, and then some.
What kind of man plans four (four!) funerals for himself? What kind of man uses his invitation list to prolong grudges after his life has ended? What kind of man mongers war around the world to impose our views on everyone?
John McCain had his strengths, but he also had his faults. Just like Donald Trump. Judging by legacy, though, I'd say that Donald Trump has accomplished more in 2 years than John McCain did in 35 years in Congress. Like it or not, we live in the real world, where abstractions don't mean much.
3
Mr. McCain certainly suffered during the Viet Nam war but so did millions of other people.
Frankly, my heroes are the people who keep us out of wars.
Mr. McCain was "military" all the way and as responsible as all the other long-serving U.S. Senators and House Representatives who allowed OUR United States of America to fall into nearly 3rd world disorder for 50% of us by allowing the destruction of Anti-Trust laws and regulations and allowing the International Mafia to control OUR money systems and lives.
Good People of Arizona it is time to elect a Socially Conscious democratic/independent Woman to replace him.
1
Maybe this is a bit off topic, but can we please remember that John McCain's supposed finest hour as a senator in casting a no vote for the appeal of the ACA was undermined months later by his vote for the Trump tax bill? That bill, in ending the mandate to purchase insurance, will result in an estimated 13 million fewer insured Americans, not to mention its grotesqueness in many other ways. The way I see it, yes, John McCain had some notable moments of bipartisanship, but like many politicians, many of his deeds do not match his rhetoric. But I guess he is the best we can do these days as an exemplar of Republican bipartisanship.
3
The America I know hass often hyper-partisan. You don't think there was partisanship during the Vietnam War? Or during the Depression? Or during the Civil War?
One of the "Great" things about America is that we can vehemently disagree but ultimately agree that the Constitution must be respected.
2
Trump not only is the Oval Office Occupant not elected by a majority of the American people.
Trump occupies the office, and he is presumed to be President of the United States. He isn't. He doesn't even pretend to be. He styles himself the president of his "base" - but he isn't even that. He is actually the president of the privileged few who support him. If ever his "base" recognizes that, perhaps we can regain some sanity in this country.
2
"Trump is unique in his indifference to America’s longstanding civic faith"
Perfect summation.
1
"Whatever comes next will have to draw on some of the ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice celebrated on Saturday." And already forgotten during the Karanaugh hearings...
It does seem that GW’s reputation is improving. It is hindsight, obviously, but I’m beginning to believe that a host of Bush’s flaws were not his directly, but those of Dick Cheney.
That said, Bush is, of course, still responsible. He was, as he said, the “decider,” and he clearly abdicated a measure of his authority to Cheney, and to a degree Karl Rove. Moreover, he is not as stupid as he pretended, for whatever reasons, to be.
Still, history has given him a break. After all, He’s no longer in the running for the worst president in our history.
3
"All you need is love". is the name of a Beatles song. Love is wonderful. Makes you forget errors.
After Senator McCain was diagnosed with cancer he appeared in "The View" a TV show. The loving face of his daughter had the magic of conveying that he was a decent person. A family man. A patriot. A great father. Just for starters.
Love will redeem America. WWII was won because millions of young Americans decided, literally, that their loved country deserved to travel far away, leave their families, learn how to fight, and how to defeat the dictators. Love made them create the Marshall Plan that ended centuries -yes, centuries- of wars in Europe. And in spite of fierce nationalism America received the love of France, England, but also from the people of Germany, Italy and Japan. We always will remember "The Candy Man" in Berlin.
Joe Biden said, "I am a Democrat, and I love John McCain". We the people love George W Bush and Barack Obama. And we are Conservatives, Liberals and Centrists.
Love accepts imperfections. We love America.
"It wouldn’t have occurred to me during the interminable years of Bush’s administration to be grateful that we had a president who believed in the basic tenets of American democracy, because I couldn’t have imagined one who didn’t."
My thoughts exactly. Thanks.
3
To answer the question posed by Ms. Goldberg, yes, I do miss bipartisan politicians. I have often thought, and Senator McCain put into words, the fact that we are all Americans and need to reach political compromises that will make meaningful change for the country. We have slid into too much political bickering with the quest for power being a goal instead of the welfare of the American people. Politicians need to listen to all of their constituents before making up their mind to vote. President Kennedy wrote "Profiles in Courage" about politicians who were willing to vote for what they considered their duty and not following the party line. We need more people in Congress who are like Senator McCain and seek to bridge the divide instead of making it wider.
25
Eloquent, Michelle Goldberg. Maybe perfect.
As a sincere and progressive Republican, John McCain was highly adept at reaching across the aisle in the true spirit of political COMPROMISE. But when it comes to genuine “compromise” in politics, we mustn’t forget that “It takes two to tango”.
In his first State of the Union address in January, President Trump proposed a path to citizenship for more than 1.8 million illegal “DACA” immigrants in exchange for building a southern border wall, ending the visa lottery & chain migration, and moving us towards a merit based immigration system...a comprehensive reform that would immensely benefit both our domestic economy and our national security over the long term.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer responded with deaf ears because they really don’t want to solve the DACA problem, end “sanctuary cities” or finally put an end to the illegal AND “legal” immigration problems that beset our nation.
Plain and simple, what they really want are complete OPEN BORDERS...although they'd never admit to that openly because it would be politically self-destructive for them to do so.
That's political COMPROMISE for you!
4
I finally agree with Ms. Goldberg on one thing! Practically speaking, the bipartisan "establishment" isn't (and wasn't) worth much. She sees what value that does exist in it in terms of preserving liberal social values and protecting the downtrodden. I see it in terms of preserving the rule of law and protecting the individual. It did neither very well.
The Casablanca moment - absolutely. Unfortunately, they never were what they used to be.
As long as Trump remains in office, we shall have a daily reminder that Hillary has to be locked up.
Three million more Americans voted for her alleged crookedness than voted for Trump's proven dishonesty and indecency. How galling that his close associates are facing prison while she walks about free and still revered while he faces a very uncertain future.
Thee were battles royal in Philadelphia before a consensus was reached for what was finally ratified as our constitution. Partisanship has always existed; Trump's trumpery has temporarily exalted it.
America shall survive. He won't.
1
@jhbev
You can't be locked up unless you committed an actual crime. Trump's associates certainly did that in spades. The Hillary non-crimes have been explained ad nauseum, so I won't repeat them here.
Even if the 2018 and 2020 elections are resounding defeats for Trump and his sycophants it is doubtful that the effects of of his presidency can be reversed. The fact remains that millions of people who knew or should have known what Trump stood for voted for him, and will probably still vote fore him. shows how divided we are and how little the Trump supporters care for the values that made America great. I am very much afraid that we are living in times that are like the 1850s, It is also likley that the Trump supporters have more guns than those who oppose him.
1
Michelle has exposed two truisms about 'murica circa 2016-2018.
1. A good portion of our citizenry have conveniently confused Patriotism with Nationalism.
2. Trump is an incompetent - no matter how malevolent his intentions, his resultant damage on America will be minimal.
Reagan and Bush2 were much more destructive forces to our American ideal because they were able to attract good operatives to perform their ideological dissection of the Constitution.
@BobbyBow Forbes estimated that Trump has already achieved 85% of his agenda. Just a wall to go.
President Bush proclaimed the rule of law as his representatives culled the Kavanaugh papers, editing out 1,000 documents.
1
If America is to survive, bipartisanship must return to DC. Especially Congress who have been playing games, both sides, since 2008. Before Obama and the Dems held both branches of government, there was civility, compromise, and things actually got passed. Both parties played the scratch my back and I'll scratch yours - to an extent that was really out of line, but at least stuff got done. Without moderation, there is no society that can be successful, especially on the world stage.
1
I have one issue with a statement about President Trump in this well written editorial: "nothing he’s done so far has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War."
I think the destruction being done to the environment by the Trump administration will have dire consequences that will extend across generations and cause untold hardships to millions, if not billions, of human beings and countless other species on our planet.
4
"It wouldn’t have occurred to me during the interminable years of Bush’s administration to be grateful that we had a president who believed in the basic tenets of American democracy, because I couldn’t have imagined one who didn’t."
My thoughts- through every Presidency I have experienced in my adult lifetime- EXACTLY.
1
"... a MORALITY PLAY shot through with Shakespearian portent and foreshadowing, a pageant of democracy's vengeance."
We aging baby-boomers, in our childhood which was also the childhood if TV, were fed a constant stream of MORALITY PLAYS, from the Line Ranger to Father Knows Best. The same is true for our parents' generation, whose childhood was shared with the childhood of film and radio. I believe this indoctrination of values led to the righteousness with which they embraced WWII and we rejected Vietnam.
Unfortunately, the morality plays have been replaced by vacuous hyperviolence. I.e., might makes right. Thus, McConnell's Republican Senate decides to oppose ALL Obama initiatives, and so forth.
1
But isn't bipartisanship just single-party with extra steps? It doesn't sound very American to me.
1
@VK
No. What's happening now, with one party ruling all three branches of government is what's un-American.
"Whatever comes next will have to draw on some of the ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice celebrated on Saturday. It was ugly when America failed to live up to them, but it will be uglier still when it doesn’t even try."
It still amazes me, although it shouldn't, that very intelligent people in the media still fall for the notion that our elected officials aspire to honor, decency and sacrifice, and that a good televised eulogy somehow echoes past greatness. As a patriot and father, John McCain was exemplary and worthy of high praise. As a public official, he was B-League, unworthy of the title of maverick. He toed the party line during his entire career in the Senate and he didn't accomplish anything big legislatively. Maybe it was because his party hates government that we should have a lower bar for the legislative achievements of Republican congressmen. Joe Lieberman unknowingly made this point during his eulogy when he recounted how McCain had asked him to be his running mate, implying that the late Senator had demonstrated independent thinking or courage. Lieberman then skipped to an anecdote about his and McCain's excursions to Jerusalem, not mentioning understandably that McCain went on to make one of the worst, and least courageous, political decisions in a generation by choosing Sarah Palin to be his running mate.
2
This country underwent a right wing coup d'etat in 2016. It was financed by the super-rich ultra-right mega-donors of the Republican Party, aided and abetted by Murdoch's Fox/News propaganda machine, and Russian election interference. Trump is the direct result of this organized collapse of democracy. He is the face of the Republican Party This right wing coup of 2016 based on voter suppression and Big Lies took advantage of American voter apathy. The Trump racists and bigots are actually a minority that cannot stand up to the majority electorate if and when they go to the polls.
Get out the vote if there is any hope of ridding our government of corporate fascist and white supremacist elements that call themselves the GOP. If not their will be only a new mourning in America.
6
As many Americans "consented" to Trump's presidency as did Bill Clinton's. Both men won with 46% of the vote - although Clinton got that to 48% in 1996. Many Democrats are kidding themselves that he's some kind of aberration born of our screwy electoral college. 1.3 million Americans cast ballots for Gary Johnson knowing perfectly well that it helped Trump get elected, but sparing them the indignity of actually voting for him.
Most of the weekend's fetes for McCain came from Dems and a handful of Reps all desperate to find at least one GOP pol not completely tainted by reaction. They couldn't find a silk purse so they settled for a sow's ear. McCain made Palin a household name. He 'dissed' Trump in life, but his legacy was having made Trump's female version credible.
There was something deeply pathetic about a morose President who spent the weekend hate-watching the funeral celebrations, and a host of tired ex-presidents and wannabes bemoaning the passing of a some golden age of bipartisan bliss. All the poisons in the mud are hatching out, super-charged by social media, leading us into a very uncertain future indeed.
2
Sorry, but this imagined bi-partisanship is a lie and has been for a long time. Working with GOP white supremacists who hate the government? Whatever.
1
On the last paragraph and especially, the last sentence, one could say, "You can never go back home..." Who said that? I agree, we should not try to return to a pre-trump status quo. That doesn't make sense anyway, and it's not "reality-based". Our best hope is thinking forward, of course. That means change and adjustment are necessary. This present nightmare will end soon enough, I think. and I don't think President Pence will get us into any wars. In the future, I wonder if Ms. Goldberg would try her hand at figuring out what can be done about fundamental racism in this country. It's more than just white nationalism.
“Trump is a uniquely grotesque individual, but nothing he’s done so far has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War. ”
I’m not so sure. The war was by far more physically destructive but the the desctruction the trump administration is doing is far worse to our country. We never had the division of the Sunnis and Shias but now the divisions in this country are just as explosive. Trump added the gun powder and match. He is wielding the power of the presidency as only a soulless villain would. I’ve never seen America so un-great.
1
Nixon is vilipended for something he did, Reagan for something he said, and Trump for everything he's doing or saying.
George W. Bush is criticized for comments made by Karl Rove. This is how GWB will be remembered, as the president who let Dick Cheney and Karl Rove rule this country.
1
Thanks Ms Goldberg. It's as if you read my 95 year old mind, but expressed it with eloquence.
1
"Trump is a uniquely grotesque individual" Yes, that is certainly the obvious truth! You could not find a greater contrast between Senator McCain and family and that of the fat, unhinged, Trump and the Trump crime family! Trump is not so much an aberration but the culmination of Republican policies and strategy since Nixon & Reagan. Republicans have devolved into a mixture of the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, The Know Nothing Party with RACISM as the fundamental motivator.
1
Good luck w/your on-going TDS treatment. Entertaining to see/hear the Dems are doing a group hug over McCain when just 10 yrs ago, this paper went as far as to accuse your hero of having a unsubstantiated affair. Dems just love a losing Republican. Again, good luck this week as Democrats demonstrate how they want to change the discourse in DC
3
"At moments, McCain’s funeral reminded me of the “La Marseillaise” scene in “Casablanca,” when refugees from occupied Europe — one of them deeply compromised — belted out the French national anthem and for a moment remembered who they used to be."
You nailed it, Ms. Goldberg. Wonderful writing. Keep up the good work!
87
@Aaron I had the same feeling but I immediately remembered: America would, in the end, be the savior and liberate the French. Who will liberate us?
Optimistically, the pendulum of political cynicism has swung so far to one side that the rest of us will be motivated to push hard to move it back toward the center. Pessimistically, why bother? This country may have permanently lost touch with the core values that made America the world's model of democracy and human rights.
1
This is the best Goldberg column I've read. Thanks.
Insightful piece by Michelle Goldberg.
My take:
The elaborate funereal dirge & Trump's disgraceful comment were mutually incompatible. Thus banning Trump from the funeral made sense.
McCain would have won the war had the banishment been real. But it wasn't. That wasn’t the plan.
Trump was everywhere. Everyone took a shot at him. Without mentioning his name, of course—a clumsy contrivance that only magnified Trump's looming presence. The takeaway: “Revenge is a dish best served cold" only if the temperature differential favors the avenging party.
Despite the anti-Trump subtext, the lasting contrast, ironically, was not McCain vs Trump. It was W vs O.
Like his other warrior portraits, W's eulogy was beautiful, elegant, poignant, celebratory… and it captured his subject perfectly.
It was Obama's misfortune to follow W.
Obama's eulogy was empty, cliché-ridden, not about McCain at all. Reread it. It was about Obama. He tethered himself to McCain to elevate himself, to ratify a patriotism that many are now, as the evidence mounts, beginning to question in earnest…
3
The funeral COULD have turned into a resistance meeting, were anyone permitted to speak with a sand grain of honesty.
In point of fact, there are far more similarities than differences between Trump and McCain. Both have been exposed as corrupt swindlers. Both prize war and destruction over diplomacy and negotiation. Both harbor racists sentiments—McCain expressing his through an ugly racial slur toward Vietnamese. Both are dues-paying members of the Republican lunatic cult, including its war on the middle class, its war on science and reason and its war on our fragile planet.
WHY is a little honesty so impossible for this country to handle? Why must we sit through yet another round of clumsy lies?
2
While having enormous respect for John McCain & his military service for our country and his overall tough demeanor during his years as a POW, I was surprised by how much bitterness was on display by him and his family----in his explicit instructions for not inviting Trump to his funeral and in all the rhetoric and pot-shots spoken by others during the service. It really showed me overall pettiness on their part.
As part of protocol, it seemed to me that the sitting president would be invited to the very public, official funeral. God knows, everybody else was. Fine if Trump weren't invited to a later more private (family & close friends) burial.
I tend to think there are still many on both sides of the aisle who are a wee bit jealous of Donald Trump for being voted in office, and who are perhaps still reeling that he doesn't toe the line that others have.
7
@Samantha Jane Bristol — jealous? If you mean envious, no. Reeling? Very much YES.
1
@Samantha Jane Bristol
Well said but after Trump's comment about no war hero. I prefer those that don't get captured you can expect the family to forgive so easily. Im amazed the American people still voted for him. If Hilary had said that she'd have lost by double digits. Seems to me Trump resonates with too many angry voters who don't much care about policy.
1
@Samantha Jane Bristol
Trump publically mocked McCain's service and imprisonment. Trump did not deserve an invite, sitting president or not. Not everyone is lacking in spine like Ted Cruz who fawns on Trump despite Trump insulting Cruz's wife and father. McCain was far from perfect, but at least he stood for something. He maybe the last example of that we see in a while....at least among Republicans, who seem to be fleeing office rather than stand up to the president.
2
McCain was a mediocre politician at best but on cue, once someone dies, the press makes them a saint.
He’s gone, it’s time to stop with the articles and the what-ifs and get down to business.
The article is very typical of Goldberg and her agenda.
1
Trump is a moral leper, and most probably deserves to be imprisoned for his shady business affairs (starting with the NY Mafia all the way to colluding with Moscow’s oligarchs) and, maybe, also for sexual crimes. However, indeed nothing Trump has done so far “has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War” (which McCain was among its chief promoters, perhaps second only to Cheney) – from millions killed to launching a religious war on the Middle East and, worst of all, to shattering the foundations of Gorbachev’s Universalist revolution and ushering in a new and unstable nuclear arms race.
The bitter moral-historical irony is that one can hardly imagine a less desirable mate to share a life-boat with in the middle of the ocean then Trump (“a golem composed of America’s sins”) and, alternatively, a more advantageous mate than the honorable and loveable McCain (a maverick destroyer of the New World Order) – Cleo’s Choice.
Trump is Roy Cohen's revenge against all those who treated him with contempt for his enthusiastic assistance to Joe McCarthy - which he considered ("perversely") to be the establishment's anti-Semitism. He groomed Donald J. Trump to share his resentments against pretty much everybody and anybody associated with "the establishment" (without the anti-Semitism bit) and trained Trump to believe that by being "true to himself" (that is, an amoral, egotistical, sociopathic, mysogonist, racist, bully) he would eventually receive the accolades and respect that he knew he deserved and never got from his father, Fred.
Trump's aim is to bring down the entire 'establishment' - all those "respectable" folks who act within the rules of law - whether they are Democrats or Republicans. He aims to turn the country into the place depicted in "Back to the Future III", with rampant corruption, greed, and oppression. Circuses for the unwashed, undeserving masses and undreamt of riches for the Emperor of Sleaze and those who kiss his, er, "ring".
Roy Cohen is laughing in Hell.
It will end with blood in the streets, as it always does. If you march along and willingly submit, fascism will prevail. That is truly the lesson of history.
2
This isn’t an original thought but Trump is a deranged toddler who has discovered that the gun is on the top shelf of the closet. He just hasn’t figured out how to get to it. He gets closer all the time and mom and dad aren’t doing anything about it.
1
Thank you Mr. Heer----"that old establishment created Trump". And I admit to getting weary of the hagiography of John McCain for who introduced us to Sarah Palin?
You mean Glenn Greenwald is still around? I thought his being duped by Snowden and Wikileaks -- like Trump, Putin's useful idiots -- would have removed what little credibility he had.
George W. Bush was a terrible president, incompetent and surrounded by awful advisers (Cheney, Rumsfeld to name the worst two), but he was not a rotten human being. He wasn't a racist, for starters. He always treated women respectfully. He was a decent human being, just one that ended up in a job way above his skill level at the worst possible time in history. People who know him say that he feels regret for the thousands of deaths caused by his irresponsible wars, and his isolation from public life since 2008 seems to be an attempt at atonement, at finding personal peace with his sins as a president.
We can agree or disagree with this view, but I think nobody can deny that he's a far better human being than the rotten-to-the-core, unethical, arrogant, narcissistic, ignorant, malevolent, incompetent mobster (and wannabe dictator) that is destroying the social fabric of America now.
This is why we look back with fondness at George W. Bush. We are looking back at the time when a human being was in the White House. That's how low our standards have fallen.
1
What is the basic difference between the FOX News Network and the NYT?
There is none!
Both of them are throwing the red meat to their viewers and listeners in order to boost up their ratings and profits.
If such a practice destroyed this country, they would claim they did nothing wrong but just their best to report the facts.
If they were reported just the facts, why isn’t their coverage of the events identical? They carefully pick up and choose the facts to fit their preconceived worldviews.
They always blame the other side for polarization, divisiveness and animosity while having only the praise for their own work.
If anybody published the truth, they would destroy the flawed competition and unite the country. Over the last quarter of century I haven’t founds such a news outlet in America…
Their worldviews are so narrow, partisan, biased and full of prejudice that’s literally unbelievable.
At least in the dictatorship the journalists are not free to do it because they would lose their lives.
What is your excuse?
If I submit a couple hundred of the comments and none of them was promoted as an editorial pick, that’s statistically a proof of bias. However, for me that’s the great advancement. A decade ago the NYT would not even publish them because it had implemented the system of “the verified and trusted readers”.
There is no objective reporting in the world. It is done by the humans. No person is objective and neutral. We are all biased and full of hubris..
3
The core truth is not that Trump is guided by the wrong principles. The man has no principles at all and governs by the seat of his pants. Sometimes, I suspect, even he is surprised by what comes out of his mouth.
The memorial service for Sen. McCain in Washington was a powerful and moving national ceremony that remembered an American hero and statesman. Both Presidents Bush and Obama delivered wonderful speeches that combined honoring Sen. McCain and reminded us what American ideals really are.
Senator McCain was probably the last great Republican. We are mourning not just the passing of a hero who had the courage to saved healthcare for 20 million people and try to enact campaign finance reform and other acts of integrity, but we are mourning the end of the Republican Party.
The once great Party of Lincoln now is the party that supports Confederate flags and monuments and white nationalist ideology.
As Lincoln wrote, "As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]."
He was right. The Know Nothings got control. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.
43
@smb
Don't forget the women also. They obviously have not been created equal.
2
The “maverick” became an aviator over the choices of men who graduated with higher grades because he was related to admirals. Panicking over his plummeting prospects, he picked a true ignoramus as a running mate. He voted against the MLK holiday and scurrilously predicted the end of DADT was going to “cost lives”. The hapless useful idiot of the neocons eulogized this man with uncharacteristic unfractured grammar. Hooray?
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At this late date the leaders of both our major political parties remain oblivious to the fact that mankind is on the verge of extinction from two distinct threats:
1. Unless current world-wide fossil fuel consumption is reduced significantly, emissions of carbon dioxide will heat the atmosphere enough to eliminate all life on earth by the end of the current century.
2. Regardless of where atomic weapons are currently stockpiled, they will be deployed by both sides during the next war involving major powers.
“It’s not a joke anymore.”
Yes, Michelle, it is. A hideous, immoral, and disgustingly destructive joke being played on the world.
Unfortunately, venting our spleen at its horror in column after column is just screaming into a gale. We’re frozen in our seats, watching as no action takes place to end or censor this joke.
McCains’s America is dead because his supposed colleagues, mumbling empty platitudes at his funeral, refuse to lift a finger to prop it up. He wasn’t flawless, but because he also voted for many of this administration’s proposals, he didn’t set a strong enough example of resistance for Congress to follow.
We increasingly don’t understand this joke but it no longer matters. We are well and truly screwed.
"nothing he’s done so far has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War. "
Not yet.
North Korea has been put on the back burner, but it probably won't stay there long. Trump may publicly maintain that his preposterous contention that North Korean denuclearfication is progressing smoothly, but more likely Bolton will help him see the light, and being jilted doesn't suit the Donald.
The nightmare of our second Iraqi war may pale in comparison to the results of a Korean military adventure.
Trump may well trump Bush, again.
3
Yep. Unfortunately, the man's talented.
Yes, thank you for articulating some of my thoughts on the improbable experience of preferring George W. Bush. He delivered an excellent statement, as someone wrote, he clearly has an excellent new speechwriter. And although his expression constantly seemed on the verge of breaking out into a silly grin, he managed to hold it in.
OK OK OK I get it. Trump is awful — not news, not a unique opinion, not revealing of anything. Using John McCain's funeral to bash us over the head with that mantra yet again is beyond tiresome.
Meanwhile Trump is getting a second supreme court pick, he's gotten a tax cut for the top earners, he's passed a 700 billion increase in defense spending, he's gotten a plurality of federal judges approved, he's stopped DACA, he's crippling the ACA, he's stirring up angst among our long-time allies, etc. etc. etc.
During the 2016 primaries I remember all the beltway pundits scoffing, week after week, that Trump will NEVER win the white house. Now they are fixated on his pettiness and tweets with much hand wringing and gnashing of teeth. George Bush WAS a terrible president and Glenn Greenwald IS right.
3
Those of us that served, and in that service were awarded specialized training which was progressively more and more expensive and exclusionary marveled that a Naval Graduate fifth from rock bottom in his class was even awarded flight school.
In the two years of Naval Flight Training he had multiple aircraft losses yet never was "washed out". Amazing.
I'd never question his service in the five years of being a POW as there is no doubt torture was applied and I discount all the tales of his conduct there. All of us would fail our own expectations with very few exceptions.
His self choreographed parade to the grave only spared us the long slow black draped locomotive pulling the single car with his "gold plated" coffin from Arizona to Annapolis...thank GOD.
I'll not miss him or his service to the Senate. Now with his demise and the retirement of Senator Flake, Arizona can now expect to get some representation in the Senate.
1
"But every president in living memory professed reverence for these values, recognizing a foundation for public life other than blood and soil nationalism.", Ms. Goldberg writes. I don't think Bush had or has the intellectual capacity to perform the activity she describes. Furthermore, he was goaded by sycophants of the worst kind of American nationalism. By the way, do you think for a microsecond Bush wrote what he spoke Saturday?
Trump is the worst iteration of the duplicitous actions of The GOP. Trump along with his republican cohorts are so busy raking in the cash they no longer listen to their constituents. They are the "elite" moved only by cash flow. Trump has brought this to the forefront and the rest of the party has simply not tried to hide it anymore with statements like," I need to consider my donors along with my constituents". There needs to be reform regarding the lobbying and other money in politics because as it stands corporations and PACS, that do not necessarily represent the wishes of a majority, are purchasing the ability to have a say in legislation. Most of us have only our single vote at the ballot box. The cash flow, in essence, allows a minority to buy more votes in Congress while affecting the rest of us and silencing our votes.
Normally I'm a big fan is Ms. Goldberg's column, but this one was really troubling. Particularly with respect to whether Trump is an anomoly or a natural progression of the Republican Party, Ms. Goldberg suggests the former, I believe it's clearly the latter.
She cherry-picks facts from the past - Nixon's "sin" wasn't just about collaborating with the South Vietnamese, it was also his use of the "Southern Strategy," which is a CLEAR pre-cursor of Trump's strategy. That same racist approach was adopted by Reagan and many other Republicans. So yes, Trump is exactly what the Republican Party had been working towards.
And lets not forget that George W. Bush truly elevated the art of selling a lie that Trump has taken up and brought to new heights. He lied us into a war in Iraq, what will Trump end up doing with it?
57
@Chrissy
I agree. But let's not forget the Gulf of Tonkin and how LBJ got us into the war is Vietnam.
Boy did you miss her point.
@Andrew Zuckerman
We were in Vietnam well before LBJ enlarged the military scope. The strategic direction and initial increase in American military forces came through the Kennedy administration. And it built on US involvement in Southeast Asia dating back into the 1950s. Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, among others, came to power with JFK.
Why is this nation that has the institutional foundations to be the finest ever created.... sending itself into a spiral dive of self-destruction?
I admit to looking at W with sympathetic eyes now. But those are the eyes just looking at style and rhetoric. As has been commented already, Bush gave the world stupid wars and a financial collapse. He was astoundingly unaware and criminally negligent as millions suffered and died because of his hubris heavy horrific decisions.
Trump is the inevitable result of Republican policies that will be viewed through an historical lens as murderous - cruelty mascarading as patriotism. There can be no redemption for a party that preaches about the right to life - when that right seems to end at birth.
2
Funerals and eulogies can rightly celebrate a life worth lived in tribute to the departed.
But, in this case, a much more fitting memorial to the ideals Senator McCain embodied would be to turn as many complicit Trumpactionaries out of office as possible in November.
Repudiate these deplorables in the polls, not just in words.
2
We witnessed a former president who started an unnecessary war in Iraq say kind words about a pilot who dropped bombs on people in Vietnam. Both seem so much better than who we have now.
3
-I'm willing to bet that either Cindy McCain or Meghan McCain will be asked to fill out the remainder of John McCain's Senate term. There is a precedent for this--when Hubert Humphrey died his widow Muriel was asked to take his place in the Senate.
However I thought McCain's funeral was a shameless spectacle. Seriously has anyone ever heard of a 4 day funeral? Even heads of state don't get such a lavish send-off.
4
@sharon5101
I was alive during JFK's funeral. Entire country shut down for days as America struggled to come to terms with this supposedly senseless killing. (hmm, there are still Russian fingerprints on that)John McCain earned this level of respect...you are aware of his selfless service, right? I know in our current 'post post modernism' it's not hip to recognize simple folks who live a righteous life without posting everything they do to youtube. As a young (liberal) draftee during Viet Nam I was assigned to the Army hospital in Valley Forge and dealt with kids my age missing legs and screaming out in the middle of the night for their mothers Yes, Sharon, McCain's funeral was entirely appropriate.
1
I couldn’t help but see John McCain’s funeral as the Republicans’ funeral. So long heroism, so long bipartisanship. The new party, the Trump Party—has stolen the Supreme Court. It doesn’t matter how they got here, right? They win.
1
It was announced today that President Trump, after not attending John McCain's funeral, will also not attend the ceremony for the unknown soldier this year. "I like soldiers who don't get killed," Mr. Trump tweeted.
2
Trump is no aberration but the logical consequence of a decades-long Republican media and marketing strategy centred on convincing a large segment of white voters that liberal "social justice warriors" have usurped the government and are using it to transfer wealth from hard-working white people to undeserving minorities and other freeloaders. Trump himself is a master marketer and self-promoter—a con man who knows how to manipulate the media to keep the spotlight continually on himself. He is the ultimate creation of a Frank Luntz focus group: the epitome of what Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, and Newt Gingrich have been cultivating in their laboratories for years now. The Republican Party has been swallowed whole by its marketing and media strategy and that strategy has now spit out a democracy-wrecking-ball named Trump. I wish I could say we can recover from this nightmare. I don't think we can. American democracy is dead and the Republican marketing and media strategy killed it.
3
And keep in mind that no matter what Megan McCain said about Trump, she's still a die hard True Believer in the Republican Party following in her Daddy's footsteps. This is the same party and it's more prominent leaders, like the phony Paul Ryan, who are afraid to oppose Trump who now owns the Republican Party not guys like McCain.
So this is where we are at in America when it comes to priorities and leadership?
Having been touched by cancer, I empathize with John McCain and his family. I truly do. But I wish the man would have shown more empathy for others.
McCain, who only rarely did the right thing for average citizens, was deified during a week-long love fest that dominated airwaves and headlines at a time when plutocratic kleptocrats and a corrupt president operate with total impunity in America.
McCain was a proud and seldom-wavering member of a political party which, among other outrages, has told millions upon millions of Main Street Americans who have horrible cancers and other deadly diseases to kiss off.
Sorry, but taking on Trump doesn't take courage or leadership. It takes basic morals and common sense.
3
The bipartisan establishment is gone ?
Nonsense.
The incessant wailing and squirming of those who align with a party tossed out of power by the voters is just a smokescreen to deflect attention away from their own failure.
Trump's election was not a unique and startling one-time event.
It was the end of an eight-to-ten year process by which American voters have removed the Constitution-disdaining left wing Progressive Democrats from power.
Their social-engineering-via-legislation-of-thought-and-behavior, and their arrogant abuse of power, has provided ample reason to seek their departure.
The new Democrats, statist and collectivist by genetic imprint, are anathema to much of the nation.
As a result of their stubborn and forceul imposition of an anti-American, globalist-socialist course, they have lost the House of representatives, the Senate, over 90 state senate seats, all but eleven state governorships, and finally, the Presidency.
But like true socialist ideologues, they soldier on, complaining that a functional democracy is in peril, and that because their majority is now gone, bipartisanship has disappeared.
Just, well, pathetic.
You are pining for a return to a time when leaders told nice stories, and butchered people behind the scenes. Trump has laid everything bare and it's no doubt upsetting. But it's time we fixed the rot, not just pretend it doesn't exist. The time of dangerous innocence and ignorance has passed. America has to grow up, and it's painful.
4
Exactly right. You’re best column!
2
One of the best parts was when Lindsey Graham had to get up and say "Love one another".
I truly thrill to that scene in 'Casablanca'. For me, the Free French knew who they were, without a doubt, because they rose to drown out the Nazis who had begun the singing with their own songs. Great movie.
2
Do you mean those bipartisan days when the media provided the propaganda narrative for W Bush's Iraq invasion and the Democrats went along with it because Colin Powell said they should?
1
The death of John McCain has engrossed the media for more than a week. The New York Times had extensive coverage of the event on August 26, 27, and 28, and on Wednesday, August 29, devoted five news pages, half the editorial page and all its reader comments to it. Since then articles and editorials on John McCain have appeared in every issue.
It's long past time to move on.
4
The problem I have with the self aggrandizing political speeches at McCain’s funeral and with the liberal sentimentality over Bush is that it reinforces what has long been obvious— many people see politics as a tribal point scoring game. Bush and Cheney were war criminals. They started a war which killed hundreds of thousands on false pretenses. And yes, the Clintons supported this decision. This isn’t some game where we sigh and complain that someone is making us look bad. It is the sort of behavior that leads to hanging if you aren’t the head of a superpower.
Americans as a whole simply don’t take our war crimes seriously. And I don’t have the space to expand on this or other issues. Trump is America’s ugliest tendencies with the veil stripped off.
3
It took the GOP 84 years to go from the humiliation of the Great Depression to dominance of our government. It will take more than a decade to reverse the damage they have done.
They have set a lasting, reactionary set of Justices in place. They have practiced fictional economics that has brought lasting debt and disdain for our government. And most of all, they have debased their own party to the point where a gangster thug could run. And win.
Now they fall in line to protect their leader. We don't know what it will take to shake their loyalty.
Even should the Democrats win both House and Senate, we cannot expect the damage to stop. But it must be slowed. Democrats must do their best at damage control.
And those of us who oppose Trump and the runaway Republican party must keep our expectations in check. Right now, damage control is the most we can hope for.
2
Thank you Michelle for another thought provoking article. It is difficult to sort my feelings about this time, man, and event. It did in many respects mark the end of a United States that many of the post war generation have grown up with, myself included. The rise of US hegemony post WWII seemed to many of us to be a time of idealistic promise, undermined by the the aberrant use of power in direct contradiction of those stated ideals both at home and abroad. The support for ruthless dictators, the endless wars of dubious legality or just cause for dubious goals, the racial suppression that denied rights guaranteed by law to all US citizens even if those citizens had fought and died fin those conflicts. all these forces marshaled under the rubric that we were making the world safe for democracy, and that the seeming dissonance between our words and actions was necessary as we marched toward that shining city on the hill. We woke up one morning to find none of it was real, that what our actions were leading to was an asphyxiation, a smothering of the light we claimed to be holding aloft. We are reaping what we have sown. Trumpism is not an aberration, but the inescapable endgame of the policies and behaviors of those who gathered to mourn, "...the bell tolls for thee".
Trump will either be the clarion call for resurrection, and more importantly, transfiguration where ideals and actions coalesce in a more perfect union, or a continued descent into the dark night of the soul.
3
John Sidney McCain, III had only two natural born American wives and cheated on and left only the first one. McCain volunteered to serve in the evil immoral Vietnam War. McCain supported thr evil immoral wars in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Libya and Syria. McCain was a maverick aka ignorant, immature, incompetent, intemperate and insecure. Not being Donald John Trump, Sr. or George Walker Bush is not something to mourn nor praise.
In the beginning the Founding Fathers malignly intended that only white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men who owned property like themselves were persons who were divinely naturally created equal with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trying to correct and rectify that original hypocritical immoral American sin is measured by the absence of any meaningful humble humane empathy that accepts the worth of black African American lives that matter.
6
@Blackmamba
You forgot to mention that McCain was the No. 1 recipient of NRA money in the U.S. Senate. Some "maverick"!
@Blackmamba
I’m curious to know your views on Clarence Thomas’s originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Thank you.
John Hume, the originator and facilitator here in Ireland of our peace process, [celebrated in the recent book, from Derry to DC] was accustomed to take a Dime from his pocket in a didactic manner (he was previously a teacher by profession) and point to the engraved legend E Pluribus Unum. It is that laudatory ideal of the United States that Donald J Trump, his facilitators and enablers have traduced. Nationalism of whatever stipe [as Geore Orwell points out in his essay Notes on Nationalism makes clear] is potentially sectional and divisive, us and them, an in group and out group. It requires to be limited and tempered by inclusive respectful diginifed patriotism in my estimation. Ms Goldberg's piece, incisive as always.
3
While I appreciate all of Senator McCain's service and sacrifice to and for this country, I feel that all of the praise for him about his so called "bi-partisanship" is a tad overblown.
After all, I don't think he got in Mitch "The man who broke the Senate" McConnell's face to force a vote on Merrick Garland.
11
When a great nation fails to husband its ideals and just rests upon the laurels of its mythology it will stumble and ultimately fall. Perhaps this is what we are seeing in America today. I hope, for the sake of the world, this is not so.
3
“More than once, I jokingly wondered if we’d ever see a president so catastrophic that we’d one day look back fondly on Bush.”
My fear is that the day may come when we look back fondly on Trump.
95
I very highly doubt that, but if that does happen, goodbye beloved country.
4
@Bob C
Not a chance.
1
@Bob C
Never.
1
McCain’s most lasting legacy over the last two years is to give the Steele dossier to James Comey and to denounce Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Putin as the nadir of the American presidency. He showed his loyalty to the Constitution over petty party.
4
@Ichabod Aikem The Steele dossier that Hillary and the DNC paid for. Collusion, anyone?
1
@Harlod Dickman
Ultimately It's the Robert Mueller investigation that will have the last say on whether or not there's collusion.
But with both Manafort and Cohen down for the count, it's not looking too good.
1
"Mourning McCain, and America"
Mourning America's Soul
"Whatever comes next will have to draw on some of the ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice celebrated [at McCain's memorial service] on Saturday."
"Will have to"? We hope so, we pray it will, but "have to" suggests inevitability. Suggests America soul can be saved. America's political, cultural, social, civil degeneration has been on a trajectory downward. Into the gutter. America's soul is on life support.
What comes next depends on whether there are enough Americans who still remember and revere America's soul. "Enough" is the key, is the question.
As we've witnessed mostly since 2000 (but even seen before), in America the majority's will can be suppressed and mostly is. Voters in Florida were disenfranchised by the state, later by the Supreme Court to make George W. Bush president. In 2016 the electoral fiasco congress made a mentally fragile despot president. Gerrymandering silences the majority.
"Enough" means not a majority, but a landslide supermajority.
"Enough" means Americans are fed up with the tricks and deceits of a political party dedicated to imposing the ideology of the minority on the lives of the majority.
"Enough" means Americans will stop being complacent and acquiescent to the abuses of a political party which means them no good.
"Enough" America! Get off your duffs and vote in November. Support a Democrat, any Democrat, every Democrat.
Save America's soul.
5
Ms. Goldberg, your words, "Trump is a uniquely grotesque individual" resonate with us, Americans held hostage by a man who has murdered truth in the Shakespearean sense, Who is occupying America today and killing America's dreams and ideals day by day.
We are witnessing -- with the funerals of two great Americans, Aretha Franklin and John McCain -- the passing of our democratic values, hopes and wishes. "People are angry!" said President Trump in Indiana as he ignored the funerals of McCain and Franklin. Yes, we are, and he is right for once...that Americans (not his base of loyalists) are angry that our country has come to one of the worst moments in our history under the horrific leadership of a demagogue and White supremacist and bigoted American man who used his money to secure the presidency as his brand. The death knells of American liberty and freedom are tolling today for all of us.
The glory of our national anthem, Battle Hymn of the Republic -- "his truth goes marching on" -- was spine-tingling to those of us who watched and heard Presidents Bush and Obama eulogizing Senator McCain at his patriot's bipartisan funeral this Labor Day weekend. We are mourning in America.
1
W was an immature kid who wanted to establish independence from his Daddy. So he fell (walked, actually) into the clutches of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Once he figured that out it was way too late. None of this excuses him. None of this excuses Karl Rove. It's only a small point, but W is a better human being than those who controlled him, and I'm sure he has many regrets. Such hard lessons make for a good funeral orator!
5
"he (=Mr. Trump) sometimes seems like a golem composed of America’s sins."
Just a reminder, the "original" (and there were many legends and many golems), was created of clay and activated through the name of God (!) and while it had its unpleasant moments, was created to protect the Jewish people, which they did. They were however imperfect and hard to control and thus feared and then deactivated.
They appear often in popular culture. Sometimes they are connected to politics. In Cynthia Ozick's 1997 novel The Puttermesser Papers, a modern Jewish woman, Ruth Puttermesser, creates a female golem out of the dirt in her flowerpots to serve as the daughter she never had. The golem helps Puttermesser become elected Mayor of New York before it begins to run out of control.
One might then describe Mr. Trump as anti-Golem although many in Israel would agree re the protection of the Jewish people motif. I doubt thought Ms. Goldberg would.
But a question Ms. Goldberg. Who created your golem or anti-Golem? Who "activated" him.
2
Minorities shouldn’t miss it
Centrists and these bipartisan groups actually end up harming minorities, gays, the poor etc
The bottomline is that the gop is an adversary to those groups and democrats shouldn’t be palling around with them.
Centrist democrats and many of those affluent white bipartisans were never at risk of being harmed by the gop so they don’t understand this or don’t care
But young voters get it
There is no middle ground. It was harmful mirage stitched together with fake news
1
Thank you for the succinct description of Trump:
“nationalist but not a patriot”.
3
'The bipartisan establishment is gone. Is it O.K. to miss it?"
If anyone actually believes that the way to answer this question is to read a column in the New York Times, then *that's* your main problem.
3
@polymath Are you against thinking?
I must disagree with MG on one point: As catastrophic and illegal as the Iraq invasion was, we were STILL better off then than now. For all of GWB's failures and attacks on our freedoms, protected, amazingly, by John Ashcroft, but then re-attacked by Alberto Gonzales, during his last 2 years he remembered what America stood for. Bush purged his Oval Office of the "neo-cons" and only politely listened to Darth Cheney, while having, at the time, recognized that the VP's "advice" was not just worthless, but destructive. I'm no fan of Condi Rice, but she was clearly a far better and wiser adviser than Cheney.
Under Bush, the pure obstructionism that began with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay (!), and pioneered by Jesse "Senator No" Helms, receded, only to blossom fully under the leaderships of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner at the ascendancy of the last truly patriotic President, Barack Obama.
Without McConnell, Trump wouldn't have happened. Without McConnell, Trump wouldn't have been sustained in his devilish, racist, destructive mischief.
But McConnell and the GOP Senate have sold their souls to the man they KNOW is evil and destructive.
"As it is wine, which so often has soiled my robe of honor, well, often I wonder what the wine sellers buy, one-half so precious as what they sell?"--From "What the Wine Sellers Buy"
What have McConnell and the GOP bought with what they've sold?
4
It might be a good idea to recall that Trump, unlike McCain, the "War Hero", didn't bomb Vietnamese civilians, wasn't on Keating's payroll, and didn't vote for every US military adventure in the last 40 years. Of course, if Trump had been a Congressman or Senator, he probably would have been entangled in the infamous "Abscam" affair as well as some other corruption opportunities - he never could resist a quick buck. McCain, if he was any kind of "War Hero" may have somewhat redeemed himself, as the son and grandson of high ranking Naval brass and the last in his class in Annapolis, preferring to spend his time drinking and "womanizing" (such a quaint term). He refused Vietnamese offers release him from imprisonment after his capture when they discovered who he was. Of course, we'll never know exactly why he made that choice. It may have been to defy his captors or to declare his independence from his father and grandfather.
I remember meeting an elderly Polish woman at an antiwar vigil who told me about having witnessed as a young girl a mob of angry French farmers beating a German bomber pilot to death with shovels and pitchforks. It would seem that McCain was treated better by the Vietnamese who captured him. Perhaps he knew that and that may have clarified his "forgiveness" of the Vietnamese - he was thanking them for not having killed him as he lay injured on the ground after having conducted a bombing run against peasants and attempting to destroy their crops.
1
Ah, the cleansing breeze of revisionist history. If you want to know what the Times really thought of Senator McCain when it counted, go back and read their 2008 endorsement of then-Senator Obama.
In the view of the Times and like-minded bien-pensants, Senator McCain performed the ultimate service to his country: he lost to their anointed candidate. Which makes the rage over President Trump's failure to follow the script all the more understandable.
5
McCain will always deserve respect for his refusal to leave the Hanoi Hilton out of turn.
However, the more recent acts of "heroism" attributed to him—his openly saying that BHO was a US citizen, his stand against torture, his vote not to take health insurance away from millions without an alternative—those things are are only a big deal in contrast to his party's dishonesty, cravenness, greed, and indifference to the suffering of ordinary people.
In any of the other advanced nations of the world, they would be normal.
Think about that.
2
You hit this one out of the park, Ms. Goldberg. Imagine, to (kinda) miss George W! The one positive thing about Trumperica is that it stretches the imagination. How tawdry can it get? Perhaps there will a reverse effect, that the imagination will extend in benign directions, into the belief that democratic ideals have not dimmed or diminished by an inch or an ounce, that they are there when the good citizens of this country are ready to employ them. Yes we can again.
3
Did I miss this bipartisan comity of which you speak? Was not "welfare queen" mentioned in the eighties? Did not Lee Atwater mention Willie Horton? Did not the "Contract With America" lead into Ken Starr and the fifty-million dollar Whitwater nothing burger? Did not the "Supremes", Katherine Harris, and Kavanaugh install Junior as president in 2000? Did not the Swiftboaters disparage a REAL war veteran to re-elect a weekend warrior and five deferments Dick Cheney in 20004? Did not the bigots,racists and ignoramuses rant and rave from 20008 through 2016? Yes, I really want the good old bipartisanship back.
85
@Tim Lynch
Valid points, yes.
I think the thrust of this piece, and the honoring of McCain, is that despite the many flaws and disagreements McCain still was - or at least seemed to try to be - a man of honor. He was decent. Good to his fellow man.
Badly flawed, yes. But isn't that how human beings are? McCain strived (and often failed - like us all) to do better for others.
He can never be forgiven for unleashing on the world the joke that is Sarah Palin. But that John McCain wasn't perfect, and often did things many didn't like, is not the point.
Eric, Trump wasn’t invited to the party either. People were mourning the lost of bipartisanship, human decency, honesty... Yes, we are grieving. We now have the worst president in the history of the USA. I didn’t vote for MCCain. Now we live in a world of vile, malicious tweets. The eulogies were a breath of fresh air. A day free from hateful remarks.
2
I hope you win a Pulitzer for this column. You've said exactly what that funeral meant. I'm a pretty far leftie and torture under the Bush years almost broke me, knowing that in my name that happened.....but each day of the Trump era has been one of complete despair for my country.
He is UNFIT for the presidency. I've been saying it before he was elected. I know this because I recognize the devastating narcissism that now rules are country. Trump is fine. Trump is great. He'll go to prison saying he is a great success. But the country? We're not alright. The world is not alright. Trump is a destroyer, but not a creator. It's just destruction all the time.
And no one is protecting us. He is UNFIT. And no one is protecting us. All protection feels gone to me. McCain's funeral was America's prescient look at our own death. We're on life support now. If Trump prevails in November - by hook or by crook - then McCain's funeral was our own.
10
@sophia Get Out The Vote!!!
Ms. Goldberg writes about Trump that “he’s a nationalist but not a patriot”. She’s right on the latter but wrong on the former. Would a nationalist have rhetorically bended a knee before Vladimir Putin in Helsinki?
Trump is either afraid of his Russian master or actually wants to be liked by him. Opposing him is out of the question. That would involve courage.
In reality, Trump is a coward. He saves his most vicious tweets for the safety of his “executive time” when he spews the vile that issues from the hole where his heart should be. He waits until he has a friendly rally crowd to assail his opponents. Even in friendly environs, he attributes his barbs to others and retreats to labels.
The same is true of any Republican who has paid lip service to American ideals and values but now either remains silent or kowtows to Trump. None more so than Trump's Cabinet. Exhibit One: Replay the June 2017 Cabinet meeting where the sycophants try to outdo each other in their praise of the “leader”. Exhibit Two: Mike Pence led the Cabinet chorus praising Trump every 12 seconds last December.
Hypocrisy or cowardice? Probably both.
4
Trump is a Nationalist, but that “Nation” is Trump and only Trump.
2
There is no Republican party anymore it is trump party and the Democrats, and the independents.
The main architect of Iraq War Dick Cheney was sitting there with his wife, and yes Bush was a very bad President.
Yesterday, I was wondering what if McCain was the President then , would He start a war ?
Yes he would I think.
Not to rehash but Gore was the winner until Supreme Court gave it to W, who now has become a Painter.
But trump is so bad, mean, uneducated, liar, xenophobe of a President let`s not go back to W, that won`t help us.
Who will be next to beat trump ?
Perhaps he will be not a candidate in 2020 anymore, and let`s not touch that delicate topic now.
Pence will be so easy to beat in 2020, the man with dead eyes, home schooled VP .
Mike Pence has no chance if Democrats get their act together instead of infighting.
3
The reason why Trump seems different and much worse than Republican precedents Ms. Goldberg highlighted, worse than Nixon's dirty tricks, Reagan's campaign race-baiting, and Bush's war mistakes is straight forward:
Trump is the only President to be openly anti-democracy. He's friendly to murdering authoritarians and treats loyal allies like enemies.
Trump's racism, lack of empathy, and profound ignorance is the core of his being. He.is proudly racist and proudly mean-spirited. While he claims to be a genius, he is proudly intellectually lazy past the point of caricature.
And perhaps most concerning:
Nixon, Reagan, and Bush were President collectively for 21.5 years. Trump has been President for just 591.days. The worst is yet to come, the damage yet to be calculated.
5
Yes indeed we should mourn Senator McCain and also mourn America for the spectacle it became under the current Republicans in power. They are responsible for the despicable actions of Donald Trump; dragging the country in the mud. These are justified reasons to mourn the country.
3
The Democrats need to fight smarter. They should take Trump's biggest issue away from him. Offer a freeze on central American migration. He'll turn that down and then his base will fracture. Next pound him on the health care issue. Most importantly, focus, focus, focus! Don't try to please everyone. Go for the jugular!!!
2
Senator McCain's service may end up marking the point when the country decided to Make America Good Again.
32
Great piece.
"The bipartisan establishment is gone. Is it O.K. to miss it?"
"Bipartisanship" has always been a more of a myth or a hoax that's predictably invoked as a self serving grandiose aspiration, political epithet or a "hail mary" play when everything breaks down, which is pretty much most of the time.
Trump is unique in the modern era for his simultaneous, enthusiastic overt embrace of fascistic governing tics, conspiracy theories and white nationalism. However, as noted in your piece, the ground had been softened by the GOP to a point where his emergence or somebody like him was a foregone conclusion.
"Trump is unique in his indifference to America’s longstanding civic faith; he’s a nationalist but not a patriot."
If you were to ask Trump's base whether Trump is a "patriot", you'd surely get an enthusiastically affirmative response.
In their eyes, he's a patriot for the benefit of the people worth being patriotic for. They've finally found their man, somebody who had the guts to throw out that dog eared, anachronistic Nixon/Atwater dog whistle playbook and is telling those people they are not welcome here and all that "american dream" stuff wasn't really meant for them, so get out of our way, leave or we will forcibly throw you out.
The fear I harbor in the middle of the night is that those "fascistic governing tics" become something "more" than that. As for the loss of the last flickering light of "bipartisanship", we can't lose what we never had.
4
Ask people who have lost sons and daughters in Bush's wars if they get a lump in their throats when they see George Bush.
Ask spouses who are caring for their loved ones with PTSD if they get a lump in their throats when they see George Bush.
Ask people who despise torture of human beings if they get a lump in their throats when they see George Bush.
Many people who have forgiven Bush's atrocities have not personally suffered an egregious loss from his insane and spite-driven policies.
The ex-presidents who are observed joshing and hugging Bush have suffered no personal losses from his policies. They will all get to spend quality time with their children and grandchildren.
If we choose to gloss over this evil behavior for sentimental reasons, we are doomed to repeat it.
9
“Bipartisanism” was mostly the Democrats caving to the Republicans and acting Republican-lite. If you’re suggesting that is what has led to Trump, you’re right.
4
Brilliant Op-Ed. Instead of 'normal bipartisanship' the U.S. desperately needs a strong third party. The existing parties are like two peas in a pod and, as Michelle suggests, Dubya has so far caused more death and destruction than Trump. Dubya was also cheer-led by Hillary Clinton who engineered the bombings of Libya and Syria as Secretary of State. I think you get the point.
One needs merely to view parliamentary debates in the U.K. House of Commons to identify the vibrancy that is lacking in both U.S. houses. The 'elephant' and 'donkey' desperately need an alternative to stop them behaving like elephants and donkeys.
4
This is not really about our previous presidents standing up and making well crafted speeches or the fact that they were McCain's foils, politically. The protocol for all presidents is to display statesmanship at a time when it is most needed. During war, horrific events like mass killings, or at the funerals of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle. For me, this is about stabbing your best friend in the back. Lindsey Graham's so called defense of Meghan McCain was nothing short of cowardice. He NEVER defended his friend's name, sacrifice, or honor when that friend was savagely attacked by the president of the United States. No statesmanship from this guy. And Graham can't get up to the White House to pat Trump on the back fast enough. No, this was not about presidential statesmanship from the people we expect that from, and who delivered on Saturday. This is about weasels. Small men who hide behind the bully attacking their friend. In my mind, McCain was right to invite his political adversaries to the funeral. What he got wrong was not excluding the people who acted like they cared, when they really didn't. There were many of them there.
7
Of all people to scold Trump, George W. Bush, takes the cake. He more than anyone broke trail for Trump and is to blame for our situation right now. Bush established the war on truth and the malice shown to those who speak it. I think he is shocked at the can of worms he sees he has opened. I will admit he has a maturity of perspective now, but it came to him after a million bad decisions of grave consequences had to unfortunately play out. We had to suffer through one rich boy's folly with just a quick grasp for breath(Obama) before the next rich boy folly got underway again.
This type of politics is not sustainable.
4
@Willow I don't think his affect indicated serious regrets, he was just reading a well crafted speech.
I am more than a little tired of the national press continuing to beatify John McCain, who for all the Beltway Worship was pretty much an awful, mainstream Republican. He could have derailed Neil Gorsuch and the awful GOP Tax Scam that will shortly be felt in our economy and budgets going forward.
You call Mr Greenwald's position wrong, but most out in the heartland would ay otherwise. I see the Clintons as Grifters, I see Trump as a Grifter and I see Obama as a Republican on everything but social issues. The embrace of the national security state, the steady erosion of our civil liberties, the ever expanding incarceration of millions in the for-profit "criminal justice" system, the outright abandonment of high quality universal public education and the capture of regulatory agencies by the moneyed interests they are to oversee shows a dysfunctional system rotten to it's very core.
3
For bad AND worse, Trump IS the GOP. The unholy ménage a trois Of “ professional “ Republicans, Evangelicals, and the right wing indoctrination machine i.e. talk radio and FOX produced HIM. It was inevitable, thanks to the Rich demanding, ultimately, zero Taxes, and the “ uneducated “ falling for the long Con. Perfect marks, most of them will never, ever, accept ANY responsibility. They will inevitably blame Democrats for their problems, and failures. Please, ask your Uncle Donald for a loan. Good luck with THAT.
2
I'll just add my humble two cents to mention that with each passing day the news on the political front gets worse. Trump's tweets are literally a Horror Show with his ignorance, narcissism and spite more nakedly apparent than ever. When a divisive figure such as Jeff Sessions becomes an object of sympathy, it's obvious the Country is in trouble. Our basic rights are in jeopardy and Trump & Co. are steam rolling ahead with reckless abandon even as the specter of Robert Mueller looms ever larger.
3
Michelle, it is understandable that you miss the more traditional GOP institutional “targets,” like a Reagan or a Bush II, who clearly represented and were one with the Party. They were like a battleship; slow to move and easy to spot and set your guns on.
But this new GOP, if you can call it that, is more like a terrorist cell. Their Osama bin Laden is Trump (or maybe Bannon and Miller, behind the scenes?). They don’t play by traditional rules of engagement. Like ISIS, they have some extremist views, in this case their hatred of immigrants of color and love of white supremicists. They blow things up and move on. They have no problem using “suicide bombers”, like Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Sanders, Mnuchin, Conway and their ilk, who commit personal, political and career suicide for the cause. Like ISIS, they are good at destruction, but not so good at building things and governing. And it is winner take all—once they take over, they have no interest in governing all the people. It is their way or . . .
So I think what Michelle misses is the old GOP because it was a stationary fighting force, predictable and easy to hit. But what is left of the GOP is not fighting that way anymore. So how does the Left fight these guys? The political battle is now more like fighting in Afghanistan. No one wants to fight street by street, hand to hand, down in the muck. But that is where the GOP has taken the battle. So that, unfortunately, is where the Left is going to have to go.
4
The fault is not in our stars but in our politics. The supreme court appointed a president in 2000 to the eternal diminishment of both the court and the Congress that sat on its hands during the entire event even though there was precedent for resolving the impasse. The court then went completely off its tracks in Citizens United and Hobby Lobby cases. The wreckage of their foolish partisanship can be found at the bottom of the crevasse into which that train- and our democracy with it - fell.
While the Democrats are not innocent, having followed the venal Clinton into the pocket of Wall Street, the worse offenders are clearly the Republicans who are greedy, self-serving hypocrites. Until we bring them to their knees in anguish, the forces that are ripping us apart will hasten in pace. This crisis is as bad as the one we faced in 1859. Rise to the occasion, fellow citizens, and vanquish them in November.
2
My God, Michelle, you had me at Glenn Greenwald, Karl Rove, and Golem (let alone Shakespear's "Tempest").
I fully concur with Greenwald, Hedges, Street, all other serious revolutionary progressives that, when you're dealt a perfectly overt Emperor piñata to beat on, do so, but remember next the more smoothly disguised Vichy party laboring for the exact same Empire.
In Rove we have the declarative first bold even boastful proof of Empire given to and quoted by Suskind.
And in Norbert Wiener's "God & Golem Inc." we have the proof of this Disguised Global Capitalist Empire intent on building an AI model of the Golem, if just to develop better techniques to hide the rising tide of 'negative externality costs'.
"Reagan's race-bait(ing)" as described by the late great Earl Shorris on his death-bed from cancer in his Harper's "American Vespers" as the first fouling cell of what was always fated to be the 'disease of Republics' --- may awaken the American people to "Revolution Against Empire" again.
It seem incomprehensible that almost no one comprehends this Disguised Global Capitalist Empire, which is only nominally HQed in, and 'posing' as, our formerly promising and sometimes progressive country, PKA America.
And yet, we could so-easily leverage this most obvious Emperor Trump first, and still have the peaceful and patriotic strength to both expunge the 2nd string Vichy Party of the same Empire, as well as implement the 'Wealth Reform' to save our nation and the world.
1
Everyone has a description and reason of why Trump.
Do we really need a reason? Do we need to be told a definite how and why Donald J. Trump came to be president? Do we need theory upon theory of our nation’s “downfalls” that led us to this leadership demise? Do we need to be told over and over how our voting system and lack thereof failed us?
There can be no answers strong enough that will ever explain to my grandchildren how this country failed them, how this dishonest, ill prepared, inexperienced man has been placed at the helm of the country I expect those kids to love.
John McCain and his life is beside the point of any reason for the likes of Donald J. Trump to even inhabit the place on Pennsylvania Avenue we look to as leading our way. Rather, at this time, this country just seems to be floating along, hither skither, one day at a time, like a balloon, drifting without just cause. The reason? A multitude of theories, but none of any worth could ever convince me, or explain righteously to my grandkids.
Mistake is the only explanation that really makes sense. But Americans, it seems, cannot accept the fact Donald J. Trump is a mistake, that we are beyond that. Well, folks, swallow it down, mistake is the biggest reason. But as Americans, we just have a hard time admitting mistakes, don’t we? Yet, there he is, tweeting, gloating, bossing, signing, dictating....all those ramifications of yes, simply a big, fat, mistake. That is the reason, mistake.
2
Here's a question I've always wanted to ask -- Exactly what did John McCain do to make anyone's life any better or easier?
Thank you Michelle, brilliant column, even if it hurts for this old Liberal to admit it, I think your points are dead on.
1
Many commentators quoted McCain's words "For whom the bell tolls," and identified those words as the title of Hemingway's novel, remarking on McCain's delight in reading fiction. The words are, truly, the title of Hemingway's novel, but Hemingway borrowed them from the poet John Donne's famous "Meditation XVII." In fact, McCain was NOT quoting from Hemingway's title, but from the "Meditation" itself, as is clear from McCain's words referring to "the main." You wouldn't know this unless you had read the "Meditation" itself. I figured that not a single commentator had read it, since not a single commentator identified the quotation correctly. I am not being pedantic: to be "a part of the maine," as Donne wrote -- "of the mainland," as we would say today -- was central to Donne's argument. It is because we all are parts of this mainland that the bell tolls for all of us when someone dies, especially someone like McCain. It is because we feel solidarity with our fellow humans that anyone's loss diminishes us, especially the loss of someone like McCain. This is the reason why we need not send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for us!
3
McCain's funeral was a travesty. It was embarrassing to watch, a combination of political whining and grandstanding.
3
"The bipartisan establishment is gone. Is it O.K. to miss it?"
Michelle, of course it is. But, it's been dead for the last 25 years. And so has our government.
We have the likes of you and the rest of the money-driven media to thank for it.
3
Bi-partisan establishment, of political elitists who hold the rest of the population in cold contempt. Including the supreme egotist, McCain.
Trump was elected to wrest our nation from their contemptuous hands and return it to the citizenry.
Bipartisan consensus on liberal democracy ? In word maybe, but in action, all greed and power for the elitists and their pals on Wall Street, and crumbs for the people who built the nation and paid the bills.
Good riddance.
Obama's recommendation to Latinos on the way forward ?
"We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us' "
Thank God he's gone. A narcissist of the first water, and an enemy of real democracy.
2
“ But Trump’s presidency has made me — and, I think, many other liberals — aware of my own deep attachment to much of the American creed, particularly the unrealized promise of Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty.“
Is better than not getting it
But I still don’t think the impact is close to sinking in given the other columns written.
Who can trust someone who doesn’t love their mother? Who is always telling others how aware she is of her mother’s faults just to make herself look better? America is exceptional. It took a bunch of republicans to say so. The identity politics crowd would have been fighting over who can put America down the most to prove how great they are.
Self inflicted wounds of spoiled brats.
“odd anti-anti-Trumpism, born of the belief that the establishment that abhors the president is as bad or worse than he is.”
Glenn Greenwald sounds more like a communist Russian from the bad old days than anyone that should be called far left. He’s probably compromised. His tell is in his dependence on false equivalency to make spurious points.
John McCain was an American icon. He was a war hero in a time when we have no heroes. He was not always likeable but he cared and he tried.
He was irreverent and irascible and able to stand apart from the horror that Trump and the Republican Party now represent. He loved his country in contrast to the Bombast in Chief that is now striding into the history books as the worst POTUS ever.
1
The funeral of Aretha Franklin one day, the funeral of John McCain the next was striking in terms of the mood and what each figure represented. I don't even yet remotely have the words to describe it.
3
The land of the free and the home of the brave. What McCain knew, and so many of us forget, is that this quote from the National Anthem says the same thing in two ways.
Freedom requires bravery. Bravery is freedom's only guarantor.
1
The longing for myths is very strong. John McCain was a patriot and as a politician his dedication to the country and to his values was admirable. I don't doubt that it pained McCain to see what the modern Republican Party was becoming. But he also supported, promoted and voted for the Republican agenda. This is a prosaic view of things, I know, when many would prefer poetry. While I see McCain as more honorable than many, he was still a man of his time and subject to the demands and pressures of the career he chose. The bipartisan consensus so many of us wish for has been gone for a long time. It was beaten down and diminished before John McCain rose to political prominence. It might be better if we let the myth go.
4
Sen. McCain’s funeral offered us a time out for reflection on American values.
And also on the people who we ask to protect and defend those values and to insure that the values endure.
Sen. McCain, a soldier-statesman, was the perfect representative of both our protectors and of our imperfect public servants. As a Navy pilot, he carried out his orders for an ill-conceived War as was his duty. And suffered long torture and imprisonment.
As a statesman, he realized the errors of the Vietnam War and strove to correct those errors.
Because he was human, he made mistakes. But he often recognized those mistakes and tried to learn from them and correct them. So, the Keating 5 gave way to McCain-Feingold.
Sen. McCain’s bequest to us is the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be an American and a human. Strive for the right, the noble and the honorable and when you fail, get back on that horse.
5
What is telling is the willing submission of the Republican Party to Trump. Their congressional representatives almost all rubberstamp his reprehensible agenda. Oh, a few, like one senator mentioned in this piece (Flake) occasionally rhetorically criticize Trump. But Flake the rest of them vote in lockstep for almost all of Trump’s retrograde agenda. Such acquiescence is, as poker players say, a “tell” that they all are onboard with the Trump regime no matter what.
Vote straight Democratic in November.
7
While we rightfully mourn senator John McCain and sympathize with his family, let us also mourn the thousands of other Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country or returned severely wounded and disabled from foreign wars.
With McCain no more, it is time to rethink and learn from armed conflicts of the past 50 years of McCain's life from 1966 to 2016 and decide whether we want to continue the foreign intervention policies in which McCain took center stage. World war I ended in 1918 was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Instead we had the world II, just 20 years later beginning in 1938.
McCain did not object or protest the Vietnam war but actively participated in it and was held as POW. If any person who should have championed peaceful resolution to conflicts and disagreement, it should have been McCain. In this century during the Bush and Obama years he promoted America's longest war in Afghanistan, the Iraq war and the regime change wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen.
It is perfectly O.K. to miss the McCain era of wars and bipartisan support for useless costly wars and begin a new chapter of peace and resolution of conflicts through peaceful negotiations and recognition that we have to have open lines of communication and reasonable working relations with the major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia.
In the months since the 2016 presidential elections a new era of peace began that one hopes will be different than the 50 years before 2016.
10
And if anyone should have been willing to appropriate money for the care of veterans who've come back injured you'd think it would have been McCain but he was NOT that man. He was stingy in this regard and veterans groups-- not the old ones but the young ones-- hated him for this.
1
@Girish Kotwal
WWII began on September 1, 1939 (not in 1938) when Germany invaded Poland.
@ginger wentworth Thanks for that information. I was not aware that he was stingy in regard to Veterans. America has been too kind to John McCain more than he deserved. It is time Americans start voicing their deep down feelings about the late Senator John McCain so that he is not thought of as a flawless senator who deserves to be regarded as anything more than what he deserves credit for. I suspect the new found love among some partisans for McCain and his daughter Meagan stem from his dislike of Trump and his thumbs down to the Obamacare repeal. Enough already about the glory of McCain. He is dead and buried. Time to move on to a more peaceful world without deadly wars.
1
The last paragraph is key.
The left is only somewhat less responsible for the untethering of America from its ideals than the radical right is.
The left in the 60's and 70's that championed civil rights, workers' rights, women's rights, abortion rights, privacy rights, rights of the accused, equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly, and democracy, was a left that was grounded in the belief that these were the fulfillment of our uniquely American political ideals.
Then along came the radical right movement, so threatened by the left's activism, so threatened by the realization of that simple, but profound notion of everyone being created equal and having inalienable rights, that they were determined to overrun conservatism and demonize and stamp out liberalism - the political philosophy from which America's ideals, its creed, came.
And they have almost succeeded, thanks to their pervasive, decades long propaganda and indoctrination campaign, and the lack of will on the part of the conservative and the "progressive" Establishments to own and defend the liberalism that is the foundation of America's political system.
So here we are, not mourning those Establishments, but the belief in the American creed that nearly all of their members let the radical right bully them into failing to defend.
6
Our country's Achilles heel is our uncritical notion of American exceptionalism. Yes, despite our many faults and problematic history, our democracy has indeed been a beacon to many throughout the world. But it also makes us vulnerable and naive to our own internal weaknesses. Before 9/11, most of the nation never believed that terrorism could come to our door. In 2003, many individuals thought it was fine when we invaded Iraq, and that we could simply export democracy there, and everything would work out well. And now we have a president who openly courts fascist doctrine and foreign dictators, while subverting the very ideas of democracy on which this country was founded.
As a nation, we need to examine our own history as well as the histories of other countries, particularly those where democracies have failed. If we continue to think we're invulnerable to despotism, then our MAGA hubris will be our own democracy's downfall.
7
@jrinsc
Thanks for your great point that "Our country's Achilles heel is our uncritical notion of American exceptionalism." MAGA from our present despot made the contrast of McCain to the despot and shows that apparently, heroes, even imperfect ones in the example of McCain, exemplifies that point and underlines yours about ..."our own democracy's downfall."
Except for his dramatic last thumbs up he voted consistently voted against Obamacare, for the war in Iraq and defending the war in Vietnam, costing untold thousands of deaths and a trillion of American deb. Compared to our bone spur president, he does seem a hero- but apparently that takes little in today's America.
I am tired of this hagiography, he did suffer grievously in captivity but this does not excuse the damage that he has done to the fabric of our social services network, a standard - of the enlightened and successful Western European societies.
3
The Democrats and the Republican were in league with each other to serve their corporate masters, not us. Ever. As far as that goes nothing has changed.
The only thing that is different is that the war against the American Commoner is over and the corporations have won.
1
Bush's speech indeed is worth quoting: "John was above all a man with a code. He lived by a set of public virtues that brought strength and purpose to his life and to his country. He was courageous, with a courage that frightened his captors, and inspired his countrymen. He was honest, no matter whom it offended. Presidents were not spared. He was honorable. always recognizing that his opponents were still patriots and human beings. He loved freedom with a passion of a man who knew its absence. He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators. Perhaps above all John detested the abuse of power, could not abide bigots and swaggering." Perfect.
3
Co-opted if not coerced bipartisanship got the US into some of the biggest messes, several of which including Iraq drags us down with gargantuan costs thru generations. The fear of appearing weak as displayed by several of the Democratic aspirants for the White House (including Clinton and Biden) was not the noblest brand of patriotism behind such ill advised and ill fated national endeavors.
Now when true bipartisanship is most needed to save the Union, where is the party of ill deserved strength that cowers under the flag of Trump for the sake of "winning" at any cost to the Union?
4
Senator McCain voted with the Trump agenda nearly 80% of the time. So in spite of his disdain for Trump, he was no liberal wannabe; he fell into line like the rest of the complicit GOP except for his key votes to save health care for American citizens. So I am able to have more than one thought about Senator McCain. I didn't care for his conservative agenda, but I could be with the Senator when Trump insulted something close to the core of American duty when he shockingly attacked McCain's time as a Prisoner of War. There is something deeply wrong with Trump and his era. The funeral might have lacked humility, but it surely didn't lack for eloquence, literacy and service. These are all qualities missing from Trump's core and from his Presidency and which were placed in high relief as former rivals speak clearly and with civility about their relationship with a former rival with whom they disagreed deeply We haven't seen that kind of decency in a while. And that is what was mourned at that funeral.
2
Our former presidents who fell short of delivering on America's potential during their tenures -- misguided as some of their and policies and national/international vision may have been -- always had an aspirational element to their efforts. Or at least they faked it.
Trump's is divorced from any concept of what we might call "the American aspiration." He's more an American perversion -- treating allies and adversaries with equal hostility (except Putin/Russia, who get a pass on everything), governing (word used loosely) with a mandate despite losing the popular vote, and enacting policies that benefit the wealthy subset of his supporters and punish the larger rest of us. He constantly vents his toxic, divisive, inappropriate spleen, and has somehow hoodwinked a relatively stable minority percentage of the country into believing that his lack of principles is a form of principle unto itself.
When Trump leaves office -- by whatever means -- his supporters will remain in large numbers. But the collective memory can be short. As Ms. Goldberg states, many who opposed W. for eight years appreciated his participation in McCain's funeral. So what we need -- both a simple order and a tall one -- is someone to wash the most cultish Trump supporters of their collective memory, and give them something more aspirational to believe in.
Speak loudly, Democratic candidates. Your ideas are already superior to those of Trump and his blind followers in the congressional GOP.
6
I'm sorry to speak a bit ill of the dead. But all I could think of this past week was am I the only one who remembers John McCain singing, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"?
To reach back to an era before the one you write about, it was Eisenhower in his farewell address who warned of the US's economic dependence on the military-industrial complex. Few in politics, except the true left, listened.
The US is a plutocracy. It is too much of a stretch for me to call a plutocrat, Democrat or Republican alike, a hero. And that cathedral was packed with them. The funeral was a lovely fairy tale, but that's all it was.
5
@Far from home
I completely agree. If John McCain, the showboat flyboy, is all we have left to make into a hero,then the country is indeed doomed. McCain had guts AND balls, but that was about it. Good judgment was sorely lacking. Lots of real heroes from Vietnam are homeless on the streets & will NOT be having rotunda farewells of weeping & sobbing poobahs. Vietnam was a disgraceful cause & a failure, & we never had a national conversation to sort out the lessons, mostly due to the likes of McCain, who just pushed on happily to Iraq, & who would have been even happier had he lived to see Trump start bombing Iran. What signifies a real hero to me is someone who fought the good fight, & also came away from it with wisdom, & honor. Where is McCain's wisdom and judgment on display? Wrecking planes by being reckless & careless. "No, ma'am, he's not an Arab, he's a decent guy."(!) Or how about voting against the MLK national holiday bill? Or getting caught up in a sleazy financial scandal. . . ... or giving us Sarah Palin, or voting along with the Trump contingent at least 80% of the time? A tax break worth about a trillion dollars to be shared by a total of less than 100 individual people?
And then a full week of (self-orchestrated) weeping & moaning for the man, with zero clear perspective to be heard inside the vast echoing vacuum of the leadership void.
3
It is amazing how many liberals, like Michelle Goldberg, always think that past Republican presidents are better than the current one. I am pretty sure Donald Trump will seem 'reasonable in comparison' too, when you compare him with the next Republican president that comes after him. I am also sure liberals like Michelle Goldberg would also dislike Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt if you put her in a time machine and transported her back to their presidencies.
This tells me that liberal thinkers need a better way of judging Republican Presidents.
1
@Andrew Grossnickle
It's hard to think that history will be kind to a president who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and who calls violent neo-Nazis and white suptremacists "fine people".
1
As a liberal Democrat living in the Deep South, I was mightily impressed by the outpouring of tributes during the McCain memorial ceremonies. Reassuring was a word that stuck with me as I watched former combatants come together in the spirit of decency and grief. Those who scorn compassion and yearn for the day when their ilk can rule over our land have given up on the hope embodied in the American ideal. And that's what saddens me. McCain, Bush, Obama, Clinton were far from perfect, but they never were under suspicion of treason, payoffs or money laundering.
We can learn much from their ability to join hands when the times and events require. It makes us a stronger nation.
1
I think it is absolutely clear that there is a direct line between Richard Nixon's southern strategy, everything the GOP has done and stood for since, and Donald Trump. Trump is a product of the Republican Party; he is its innate ugliness exposed to the world, without any of the genteel masks. In that, he is to be commended. His failure to play to any of the niceties of democracy and yet still maintain 89% support among Republicans says all that needs to be said. But I am one of those people who believes that Bush was still a worse President than Trump, based on the actual outcome of his actions. Michelle makes an important distinction about Bush's supposed beliefs and the rhetoric of democracy surrounding them, but Bush's presidency exemplifies the idea that American values are a smokescreen for crass imperialism. And many of the attitudes and ideas of Trump and his supporters have their direct roots in Bush's era; the neoconservatives who ran amok under Bush longed for an American Empire that was answerable to nothing and a world where international law was, at best, a suggestion. Trump is continuing - in a grotesque and unveiled way - down a path carved by Bush long ago. In the end, whatever follows Trump must involve a repudiation of how things have been done in Washington going back decades. The GOP itself must, ultimately, be dismantled as a party and a movement. Whether or not that is possible remains to be seen.
4
Michelle, are you sure that this sentence is correct in the context of your meaning: “Trump can’t help but shine a forgiving light on everyone who opposes him?” This is your last sentence in your third to last paragraph.
I believe what you’re saying here is opposite to the reality. Trump can’t forgive anyone who opposes him as we have seen time and time again. He shines no radiant light but beams dark rage at all who speak against him.
In RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminds us of the words in the Preamble of the Constitution:
“We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice....”
Trying to form a more perfect union means that we call on our better angels as citizens and our representatives are required to do so in their oaths of allegiance. Trump has no intention to act in accordance with our highest principles of government.
RBG reminded me again of what the lifeblood of our nation is made of: clear minds, strength of purpose, and a unflinching determination to live up to the best in us all. As long as we hold these truths to be self-evident, we will not falter as a nation.
4
@Ichabod Aikem
I think what you meant, Michelle, is that compared to Trump, other GOP presidents can be looked at with a forgiving light because they pale in comparison.
Great yes, but—- When will the past presidents pen that joint letter that needs airing?
Standing still is not a virtue in an extreme emergency.
3
"During George W. Bush’s very bad presidency, liberals would sometimes invoke Ronald Reagan with a sort of incredulous nostalgia, astonished that he seemed reasonable in comparison. More than once, I jokingly wondered if we’d ever see a president so catastrophic that we’d one day look back fondly on Bush."
Projecting this trend further forward produces some interesting possibilities to contemplate with your bedtime glass of warm milk. It could take us completely over the edge and bring forth a new paradigm altogether, perhaps a ruthless machine that passes for human or some sort of mutant generated by global climate change. Or maybe a deeper probing into the rich manure of celebrity culture will simply uncover an even more perfect Trump.
But have we actually reached the point where by blanking out Iraq we can make George W Bush look good? This seems to reduce the entire project to a mere exercise in style.
1
HE, for I will not mention his name, can criticize football players for kneeling at the playing of the National Anthem yet has to be forced to lower the flag at half mast for John McCain, a respected individual who served his country in so many countless ways.
Here, in London, I am constantly asked how such an ignorant man can lead a great nation. I cannot give an answer to that question other than to say ‘this too shall pass’.
And when I return by ship I will get up early to view the Statue of Liberty from my balcony to be assured by the beacon of her shining light, that we rightfully chose to live in a land that welcomed us when we were immigrants, not that many years ago.
The man who would not lower the flag without being shamed into doing so does not represent the America that came about by men who had a vision and created a haven for those of us seeking one.
1
This is why rhetoric matters.
It doesn't matter as much as actions and deeds, but at the very least rhetoric sets a standard by which one can be judged. Hollow praise of democratic ideals is better than no praise at all.
The crazy horror of our current situation is that the meanings of words themselves are being altered. Reality is called, "fake." The subjective has become objective. Rhetoric is undermined by Orwellian dictionaries. Even "democracy" has lost its meaning, especially when you consider that the popular vote is regularly overwhelmed by an undemocratic electoral system. "Blind Justice" is clearly not blind. It favors the rich and the white. The "rule of law" is a rule by executive order.
Even rhetoric is in danger.
1
We vote in 63 days. Please let's vote in a way that will end this national nightmare. I have never been one to shout out my patriotism. I don't sing the National Anthem, nor pronounce the Pledge-of-Allegiance. I am not saying I'll start either, but it is almost to that point if indeed we come out of the tunnel of blackness. And perhaps I will be able to forgive the few people who I know voted for the Grifter, some, not all of them.
1
McCain has enjoyed considerable sycophancy during his self-orchestrated death spectacle. However, this great man was birthed in the Vietnam War of aggression, raised in Reaganism, and came to maturity under G.W. Bush when he advocated for the Iraq War crime. In addition, McCain's revealing embrace of Palin's far-right views set the stage for the current occupant to win and thrive. In short, John McCain set the stage for the emergence of our current evils. He was a pyrrhic Senator and we might not survive another such.
5
America, don't you miss the good old days when our politicians showed common decency and bipartisanship while they started catastrophic wars and destroyed our economy? No, no we don't.
1
“Trump is a uniquely grotesque individual, but nothing he’s done so far has been nearly as destructive as the Iraq War.”
I would not be so quick with this assessment – it may well be that withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement produces far worse effects than even the Iraq War.
4
I looked in my crystal ball and saw the Democrats winning in November. Trump then began wheeling and dealing with Schumer. Trump restored Obamacare, he signed a new Voting Rights Act into law. He backed an abortion rights provision to replace the repealed Roe v. Wade and he supported a permanent exension of the middle class tax cuts in his tax bill. Shortly thereafter Mueller took a long walk off a short plank. Don’t kid yourself. Politics is full of unholy compromises. And in a democracy as in any sytem of government it’s all about the ends. Any means will do. OK I’m exaggerating. But my crystal ball has always been more right than wrong.
Ten years ago you could’ve never convinced me I would ever miss George W Bush. But today, watching the speech at the funeral, I was actually nostalgic for him. Of course, I didn’t weep as I did when President Obama took he stage. I pretty much do that every time I see him now. It reminds me there was once a time when I didn’t wake up in fear, rage and loathing.
3
Excellent commentary, Michelle. The gauziness of the past has a tendency to play tricks on the mind of the present. Some of the more prominent speakers and attendees at Saturday's funeral are still arguably called war criminals by their fellow citizens yet are seemingly forgiven, at least for a few minutes, by an idealistic longing for the truth that probably never really existed. Yes there were gobs of sentimentality/patriotism/hero worship tossed around that day
in honor of someone who, while humanly flawed like us all, managed to transcend the petty cynicism, gross indecency and ubiquitous illegality practiced by this current administration to provide his countrymen with the inspiration to follow in his footsteps and never stop fighting for a better tomorrow.
Michelle, like Dr. Strangelove, you have learned to "love the bomb", only in this case the bomb is Trump. He was a necessary circuit breaker that scrambled the elite and has made all sorts of previously unobtainable Leftist ideas possible.
1
In January, 1971, as I rode the bus to my high school, I overheard some of the other boys buzzing excitedly about a TV show they had watched the night before. They could barely contain themselves--finally, there was a character on TV who spoke for them, who "told it like it was". I soon discovered that the character's name was Archie Bunker. I intended never to watch such a show, but the following week my mother put it on. That is when I realized it was a satire. The boys who were so excited about it never got that essential fact. These were the same guys who constantly taunted minority kids of all hues by telling us to "go back" where we came from. Never mind that we were born here. Mind you, this was not Alabama--it was Connecticut.
Archie did not understand this country's principles. He was a racist and a blood-and-soil nationalist who saw only enemies around the world. He was the prototype of the Trump voter. His fans took him at face value, and waited 45 years before finally getting to vote their beliefs.
Your article is moving and thought-provoking, but you are terribly naive if you think that this is something planted by the Republicans. They only discovered it, and, yes, they cynically fed and nurtured it. But it was always there, waiting for its moment. Half the people in this country NEVER believed in the principles you love so dearly.
3
America has never quite lived up to its ideals of promoting the common good or that all men (women) are created equal. We get a little closer once in a while, but there are always those who drag us back. Those people who drag us back are called Republicans.
What we mourn isn't only the passing of John McCain, we mourn the loss of truth and decency.
4
George W. Bush was invited to speak at John McCain's funeral. He gave a moving speech in support of American ideals and courage. He could not fathom what Trump has said even from the very beginning, at his inaugural address.
Barack Obama was invited to speak at John McCain's funeral. He gave an amazing speech in support of American ideals and courage, even gracefully making the audience laugh at one point. He never invited Trump to the White House, until he was absolutely forced to do so.
Donald Trump was not invited to John McCain's funeral. He gave no speech in support of American ideals and courage. He spitefully lowered the White House flag to half staff for only one day, then re-lowered it only after intense protest against what he had done. He has only grudgingly acknowledged John McCain's devoted service to his country, as a true war hero, something Trump will never know anything about.
So much winning at the funeral that day.
For John McCain. For Barack Obama. For George W. Bush.
But not for Donald Trump. Never for Donald Trump.
3
The challenge, should we succeed in saving our democracy this November will be how to reconcile? There can be no reconciliation without truth, as in, "we hold these truths to be self evident." Obviously, there are some 60 million among us who didn't get the founders memo. I do not pretend to know how our institutions respond to extract expressions of guilt and shame for the hateful racist authoritarian nationalism fomented by republicans these many years. But without this truth we will be doomed to descend to Zimbabwe lows rather than the hopeful aspirations of South Africa.
2
A beautiful piece of writing Michelle.
A masterly column that briefly describes the roots of Trump and Trumpism. But, no credit is given to Newt Gingrich and his war on all elected officials who disagreed with him.
Perhaps the most sickening part of the National Cathedral service and before that the memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda was seeing all those Republican Senators and Congressmen, virtually every last one of them a Trump enabler. Flake and Corker are not profiles in courage, because they are not running for reelection, and who is listening to them? No one.
2
"It wouldn’t have occurred to me during the interminable years of Bush’s administration to be grateful that we had a president who believed in the basic tenets of American democracy..."
Do you, Ms. Goldberg, include our constitution as a vessel of the basic tenets of American democracy? Because if you do, you may have been dozing during a good part of those interminable years. Bush, Jr. even violated precepts of democracy going back before our constitution to the Magna Carta signed in 1215. The reason we needed the White House converted to an expiatory chapel overseen by a young president with reasonably clean hands was that Bush and his cabinet were personae non grata in most foreign capitals around the world. The nation had become a disgrace. It was under Bush that these funeral proceedings took on the trappings they presently have, suitable for medieval Christian knights. Men like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their squires in the government may be seen as war criminals here and abroad but they are guaranteed funerals with all the trappings, suitable for heroes, occasions where the faithful can solace one another.
Is Trump a true nationalist or a a vainglorious individual hijacking nationalism as an easy strategy to gain admiration? It is easy to wrap yourself in the American flag and wear a MAGA cap. But, so many of Trump's actions (I hate to use the word "strategies" with this president) are counter-productive to boosting America's fortunes. Needless trade wars, exploding debts and deficits, divisive rhetoric, filling rather than draining a swamp and mocking war heroes seem counter-productive to strengthening a nation and more conducive to securing and maintaining the sole focus of the personal spotlight.
It seems as if Trump's philosophy can be summed up in three words: me, myself and I.
56
John McCain's death gave us a boatload of eulogies none more impressive than his own address to the Senate before he went home to spend the last days with family.
There were the Eulogies in Arizona which in terms of notable quotes was my favorite. That was the best funeral service in a a very long time. Most of those that spoke for John really cared for him and it showed.
Then there was the Capital Rotunda service which was my least favorite as many that spoke were there for the powerful photo op the moment provided. For example, Ryan and McConnell spoke of McCain's respect for our constitution but lacked the conviction that anything they would do moving forward would be motivated by what they said that day.
And then there was the service in DC. Kissinger, was a surprise but provided great insight to the era that brought us "Senator" McCain. As he walked slowly to speak, I was wondering "why him"? I was not disappointed. Bush and Obama took too much time to focus on their disagreements with McCain which I thought was wasteful. Biden did that more masterfully. All said, I give the funerals a B+. They lose a half-grade for the failure of the Rotunda eulogies.
I don't doubt for a moment that once they were done, Ryan, McConnell and others went back to their offices, kicked back in their chairs, and thought; "Well thank god that is over. Now were did we last leave off?"
Trump got his slap on the wrist last week but no doubt Trump didn't even feel it.
5
Let's be clear, Trump isn't an aberration in the Republican party, he's the result of years of Republican politicians pandering to the most extreme elements on the right.
Now those extreme elements control the party that's why you'll find very few Republicans willing to stand up to Trump.
16
Thanks, Michelle. I completely agree. And it sounds weird, but it was so refreshing over the weekend to, for once in the last 2 years, not have to worry about hearing a rehash of the misfit in the White House's tweets. The soaring rhetoric at the funeral finally drowned out the background noise.
4
The difference between Democrats and Republicans isn't just political it is much deeper, we have a difference in personality types. Autocratic versus democratic personalities.
Democratic personality types are "rules based," principle governed, behavior. Republicans believe that "might makes right," power should be acquired and used to achieve one's personal and political goals. That is why it could be said that Democrats bring a copy of the constitution to a gun fight.
Americans must decide if we want a nation of rules, laws and principles or a nation that is run by whoever can gather the most power. What kind of people are we Americans going to be?
28
@Ronny: Shallow, sweeping generalizations, so long as they are anti Republican, above all anti Trump, r certain to get printed and harvest recommendations.But re Constitution, it appears that Democrats r the ones favoring open borders,amnesty for DACA and sanctuary cities, and who have little respect or none, for our Constitution , based on English common law, and democratic principles laid out at Runnymeade in 13th century.Democracy in an invention of ancient Greeks but also of our Anglo Saxon forebears! Unfortunately, not everyone seeking asylum has the same regard for the Founding Fathers! Nota bene to EB: This represents about the 12th or 13th comment submitted in last 3 days, yet all of mine r erudite, informative, educative, and civil. Why the lack of fairness on EB's part when it comes to Alexander Harrison?" A bas la censure!"
Thank you Michelle Goldberg for a thoughtful, measured assessment of where we are today in American life and politics. We can only hope that there are better days ahead for this great country. We must be an example to the entire world of what a kind, generous and fair democratic nation can be. It is an ideal that can never be fully achieved but one in which we must all continuously aspire.
16
Very well put, Michelle.
13
What made my mother most proud of three kids she raised was in her words: "we knew how to behave." What she meant was in public settings we knew how to behave around adults---we didn't interrupt conversations, we didn't make requests of our parents, we weren't loud in conversations with each other, and we didn't engage in any activities that required our parents to stop attending to adult talk. What is most offensive about Trump, is not his policies---which were predictable---but his behavior---he does not know how to behave around adults. What we watched this weekend were hours of adults gathering together and acting like adults, while the child in the room had been sent to time-out on a golf course.
31
@ACJ
So you would destroy a presidency because the President, no matter how effective, offends you personally?
Yes, Trump is childish. He's a barbarian. It wouldn't surprise me if his Trump Tower apartment was decorated with the gilded skulls of his former enemies.
But he's got the economy humming. We, the sensible people of America, will forgive him much for that. And he's given the US a foreign policy of something other than "doormat" to be stepped on by the world. We'll forgive him much for that too.
R.I.P. John McCain and with you the Republican Party. With Donald Trump aided and abetted by his all too willing accomplices House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell we now have a Trumpublican Party dedicated to the principle that all men and, especially women, are not created equal and of government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. And with Brett Kavanaugh they hope that the Trumpocracy shall not perish from the earth. R.I.P. beloved Constitution and all those like John McCain who have given "the last full measure of their devotion" to it.
16
I was moved by what Governor Kasich, a true friend to McCain, said on Meet The Press on Sunday. In a strong rebuke to Trump and party-first-nation-second mentality, Kasich implored the nation to vote for unifiers, regardless of party membership. We must come together to solve our problems on the basis of our common values, regardless of party. America needs unifiers not dividers and I hope that there are more like Kasich to bring us together. Cooperation and compromise are not capitulation, they are the only way forward.
23
@dudley thompson That's a Kasich, "Republican Smoke Screen" designed to get you to believe in "compassionate conservatives", etc. Vote for any Republican and the first thing you'll get is noise to repeal the ACA (Obamacare) and attacks on Social Security and Medicare and a woman's rights to an abortion. That's the first thing on their agenda. Don't even let a Republican get their toe in the door.
4
@Steve
You have provided the perfect example of what is wrong in politics today. Even the dreadful Nixon came to realize that "When you hate, you destroy yourself." Politics is not war. Our adversaries in politics are Americans too. We can't cooperate and compromise in an atmosphere of hate.
1
We, and the ideas on which our country is founded, are at risk as long as Trump has virtually unrestrained power.
Ours has never been a perfect union, but we have never had a President so ignorant/uninterested in what really makes America great. Trump's America is self-promotion, greed, and performative cruelty. He works against majority will and the public good. It is hard to imagine a less American leader.
The only way to stop Trump is to check his power. The way to check his power is to elect Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate and Democratic governors in red states such as Florida and Georgia. (The 2020 Census and reapportionment of congressional districts are just around the corner.)
We will know in nine weeks if enough Americans stepped up to stop Trump. Register, volunteer, canvass, text, write postcards, get your neighbors and friends out to vote. It is the only way.
vote.org
30
@ClearEye
So you think a politically correct welfare state of enforced equality-of-results, mandatory dependency by all on government, no effective borders, and a foreign policy of Please-Tread-On-Me is "what really makes America great?"
How odd...
As I watched Saturday's funeral for John McCain, I was surprised by my tears during President Obama's eulogy, following the remarkable eloquence of George Bush. I realized, much as articulated here by Michele Goldberg that, even as an insistent cynic about chest-thumping patriotism, I profoundly treasure our American freedom and those democratic ideals so splendidly on display that day at the National Cathedral. I was perplexed by my unexpected emotion, but soon realized that I mourned the loss of civility, restraint, and intelligent discourse. I wept at the realization that our current leader is wholly incapable of delivering such elegant and gracious tributes even to his allies, and certainly not to those he vanquished in poltical battle. I cried in missing what we can be, and in grief over what we are most certainly not.
108
It's helpful to keep things in perspective and remember that the nasty modern nationalist trend began with the Reagan-Begin-Thatcher era. But we shouldn't be distracted from the present, especially by Trump, as news-rich as he may appear. This is a political game of three-card monte. Pence is already maneuvering to be president and may well succeed. Meanwhile the Supreme Court, the umpire of our basic rights--in fact, the rights that allow us to protect our rights--may shift much further to the right.
16
@G C B Begin? Why drag Israel into this? That feels like a cheap shot.
At the end of the Civil War, Republicans were dominant. That was the party that passed the 13th, 14, and 15th amendments. Their reign was broken only by Grover Cleveland (twice!) until Woodrow Wilson. They made a modern world of commerce, transportation, communication, and frequent recessions. The Democrats dominated the Great Depression and early post war keeping the GOP out of the presidency and in the Wilderness until Ike. Dems made a world of technology and communications and invented a new order. Since Reagan there’s been a tug of war with not much to show, a long transition state. But history shows the party that wins the transition, and we are in a transitional moment, sets the stage for the next half century. Given the turmoil in the electorate it is hard to see how Trump prevails beyond November but we have to be on guard. The world desperately needs enhanced resource availability (think WATER) and a new energy paradigm. Those won’t come courtesy of the GOP.
18
One way or the other, the day will come when Trump is in the rear view mirror. Will we ever look back, as Ms. Goldberg and many liberals have with respect to Bush 43, and say that we can’t believe that President 47 or 48 makes 45 look like a normal patriot by comparison? The only way to prevent blood and soil nationalistic populism (which we now call Trump-ism) from metastasizing in our politics is for every generation alive that has been called to serve on the front lines of politics to remain on duty. To show up and vote in every municipal, state and federal election, to volunteer to canvass door by door, neighbor to neighbor, and relentlessly oppose the candidates of any political party that would, as the GOP has, provide aid and comfort to those who would vow to remake the idea that is America in his own image. The day may come when it is again safe to vote Republican. But in the interim, the only response to the party in thrall to this graven image that it will understand is ‘nyet’.
14
"....the current president, who possesses none of McCain’s virtues or, for that matter, any virtues at all." The awfulness of this Trump era has had one positive aspect for me personally. I have discovered my own latent patriotism. I am not a pseudo patriot who flies the flag every day and would shout "USA, USA!" But I do fly the flag not every day, just on national holidays like Memorial Day, Independence Day and yesterday, Labor Day. The real patriotism comes from believing strongly in the Constitution, the rule of law, country before party, and the ideals upon which the founders of our great country believed and more importantly , acted upon.
15
Things in this country are pretty bad if we're at the point of arguing over the political significance of one's funeral, even though that person happened to be a politician.
However the point is that we didn't actually need the funeral of Senator John McCain to realize just how insanely polarized and partisan this country has become -- the election of Donald Trump was enough to do that.
Not only because he only focuses on the same core base of his supporters while ignoring everyone else, but because he has usurped the Republican party which is in control of all three branches of government, and has formed it into nothing more than an image of himself.
So if the question is if it's alright to miss a bipartisan establishment; one that at least attempted to represent the interests of ALL Americans, and not just the chosen few -- the only logical answer must be a resounding YES! And I do...
6
I expect things to seem even worse in the weeks ahead. This is
because I've come to the conclusion that we've been,
all along, a captive audience to a big show. The phrase I've settled
on to encapsulate it is: giant fraternity stunt. (Alas, I can't
prove it.) If it is a show, it has to come to an end, though. The
question then is whether the truth will be revealed in a graduated
series of disclosures or in a singularity like the one in which
Manhattan Project workers found out after Hiroshima what they had been working on -- huge headlines screaming "It's a Bomb!"
4
Look back fondly on Bush? Lordy. I've been looking back fondly on Nixon. And this from someone whose father hosted a party the night he announced his resignation. At least Nixon was intelligent and left the WH voluntarily. I fear what Trump might do when the day comes. And it will.
41
To paraphrase Wordsworth: We wander lonely as a cloud...
Many can agree that America is not and never has been a perfect democracy. But we too often fail to see that the Constitution is in effect a charter for the Slave States and their successors. We all nod, "yes," that the two senators per state rule is undemocratic. Ditto the Electoral College. And if anyone is still unaware of the practical effects of these, look at Trump and at the judicial bench he helps McConnell to construct. We cannot amend the Constitution while the two-senator rule is in place. The Slave States locked down the future. And with The Second Amendment, they ensured that their supporters would make see to it that we stay locked down.
27
This is an admirably thoughtful column and even a courageous one. In liberal/progressive circles, it’s easier to get a thumbs-up by writing dismissively of everything but the change to come (or never coming, for those who don’t want their grievances trifled with). Thank you.
Count me among those liberals who share your awareness of a “deep attachment to much of the American creed, particularly the unrealized promise of Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty.” Yes, particularly that. The persistence of support for Donald Trump in some quarters despite all the harm he’s doing and threatens to do must be due to an all-consuming fear of that promise. Trump is the champion of those who wish, above all, to fossilize the American people in their own image.
As you write, “You can mourn the passing of a bipartisan consensus on liberal democracy without believing that we can or should return to a pre-Trump status quo. Whatever comes next will have to draw on some of the ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice celebrated on Saturday.” Certainly that status quo is not an option. Granted Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020, the vampire-bitten Republican Party must receive either a stake through the heart or a very lengthy transfusion and recuperation. In the interest of uninterrupted two-party democracy (or two-plus), an honorable alternative would be most welcome.
I believe that we’ll come through this and that we’ll then have no real choice but to rise higher than before.
27
I didn't like McCain much when I was working on the Obama campaign in 2008, but I came to respect him when he defended Obama against detractors.
I read his memoir several years later, and now I much respect this gentleman of the Senate, and war hero, and a true patriot of our country.
My grandfather, father, and uncles served in WWI, WW2, and the Korean wars.
So Trump yapping on about he supports our veterans when he got five deferments in the Vietnam War due to "bone spurs" should ring hollow to any real veteran.
54
@Pat...I agree, but how do you explain Trump's Purple Heart?
If nothing else Trump demonstrates the power of the presidency. Senators that we felt certain would recoil at Trump's vulgarity, vacuousness, egocentricity, cruelty, and contempt for the office found themselves complicit. An entire party that we would have expected to be enraged at foreign powers interfering with our elections has chosen to look the other way because they believe the interference to be in their favor. I wonder if Democrats would respond similarly should the elections be maneuvered into giving them such a president. Have we always been that way? Did we always just assume that the president, no matter who held that position, no matter how flawed, would always put the welfare of the country before personal interests, and would play by the rules because the rules matter? Did we ever really care? The opportunities for dispelling these pessimistic fears are dwindling. Every election that follows is of more importance that I could have imagined.
30
@syfredrick:
I ask myself the same questions all the time but there's still only one party trying to move in the direction of equality for all Americans. And one party trying to do the opposite.
13
@syfredrick In fact Congress is endowed with far more powers than the President. They have chosen not to apply them.
If they were in the military and their superior began to shoot at civilians without reason, they would be obligated to use friendly fire to save them. Unfortunately this is not that organized.
1
Which is worse, ignoring your appointees and agencies like CIA and State, as Trump often does, or co-opting them in a WMD lie to justify an invasion of another country that kills hundreds of thousands and costs trillions as W Bush did in Iraq?
Hard to forget SOS Colin Powell's Iraq WMD presentation to the UN, which proved to be false, and led our allies into a joint project that should have left considerable doubt about US credibility in future situations.
The possibility of Trump's on-going collusion with the Putin kleptocracy, as most recently described in the book, "House of Trump, House of Putin", may yet prove more damaging to western democracies, if not blocked by a too compliant Congress, as in the authorization of the Iraq War.
And let's not forget the ruinous tax cuts, steel tariffs and unfunded expansion of Medicare during the W Bush era or the Great Recession that wiped out half of the net worth of the average American household, fueled by a regulatory collapse which seems characteristic of GOP Administrations of the last four decades.
For some reason, accountability for past failures has faded as a voting criterion among the US electorate.That may turn out to be the most dangerous of all for our future.
45
This is a wonderful editorial. We cannot go backwards. Yes, we can learn from the past, but the only direction is forwards. I yearn for a government that works together to achieve an equitable, conscientious society, that values each of us and the world that we live in.
38
A man died and the streets were not thronged with weeping people demanding a grand spectacle.
Instead this was a pageant that the press and the establishment threw for themselves.
A full week of mourning, filled with sentimentality about patriotism, the flag, religious faith, and military heroism. How many millions did it cost?
Were it not for the relentless framing of the press, telling us how fine a man he was, and how significant was his passing, I doubt if many Americans would have spontaneously mourned McCain beyond a casual notice.
Yet the funeral was held with a grandeur similar to that after the assassination of JFK, when all Americans grieved.
It was a week of self congratulations for establishment people. Two presidents praised their own values. A daughter who aspires to celebrity as a sullen talk show host, delivered a eulogy where she auditioned a side of herself which looked principled.
Humility was so scarce you could have sold it. The press was as self important as the players.
It was a party to which I'm not invited, and a mythology to which I don't subscribe.
Quite honestly, for most of us little people, all of it was far above our heads.
48
@Eric
Your last sentence is so true.
Transcendence provides perspective.
1
Aside from a few breaks from his party’s demagogues to work with the other party on a few good pieces of legislation - support of campaign finance reform, affordable health care and against CIA/DIA torture - after burning who knows how many Viet Namese as a and, after he discovered he was dying , the lies of Donald Trump, I don’t see much heroic about John McCain’s life.
Then again, I don’t see anything heroic about anyone who jumped up to prosecute the air war in Viet Nam.
[NB: this is not about the ground pounders who were given the choice between “volunteering” for front-line ground combat and trial on exaggerated local criminal charges - like a friend who did two two tours, whose life was right out of Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, a song people never listen to the grim words to between the singer/writer’s deep black sarcastic riff on an Aaron Copland theme, when he sings the title words. Wish he’d been smart enough to call the song, not the album, “American Tragedy”.]
A friend from the ‘72 McGovern presidential campaign, a draftee who learned how stupid he was, at 18, not to dodge, told me the truth about most US POWs - they were the fighter-plane jocks who came down to tree-level to spray Napalm, sticky intensely hot-burning jell on grass-hut villages and their non-combatant residents, and were occasionally brought down by antique anti-aircraft guns in the hands of the NVA and the VC.
And dump tons of carcinogen/defoliant on our troops.
1
“All of us”? Speak for yourself.
I didn't realize how deeply I love Democracy.
I didn't realize how deeply I love its values and institutions.
I didn't realize how deeply I love the ideal of fair play.
I didn't realize how deeply I love the integrity of our elections.
Every time trump and the republican party break the instutions of Democracy, I physically feel my heart's heavy hollowness.
I feel sorrowful because their are people in this Democracy that don't want it.
I now understand that Democracy can end.
Why isn't it being protected?
116
@Ann
It is also under threat from both sides of the political spectrum. We have MAGA/Trump followers attacking the rule of law and we have Socialists on the left attacking our political and economic systems and would put us on the path toward Venezuela if we would let them.
1
@Andrew Grossnickle
"Socialists on the left.." are a creation of the Republican party. Even diehard Bernie supporters don't believe in Socialism which, according to the dictionary, is defined as the 'state owning the means of production.' However, the Rs use their intentional misunderstanding of the word to their supposed benefit.
2
Finally, it is refreshing to read the comment above about missing a democracy as simple as that. Focus on what went on this week, celebrating the life of John McCain. John gave his last speech about what what he treasured in his life, perseverance. Using the words “ old fashioned” is a scape goat for non action. The government is dysfunctional, for two years a criminal has been loft to destroy anything within reach to satisfy his own desires. This country is in trouble , what are your great ideas? Talk it to death mock everyone.
The nation paid its respects to John McCain, a working senator and a war hero.
In addition, Americans were projecting onto McCain's casket and memory the need for unity and decency.
A Trump supporter in Phoenix complained to me that his days of memorial lasted too long. I said, "You missed the point."
81
Regarding “whatever comes next” in America’s political life, I do not see a politician in power or any on the horizon who has the will “to draw on...ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice.” I expect the current “dark ages” of the American experiment to be with us for perhaps a generation. I hope not, but I fear that is the reality we are facing. Why? Because I believe the majority of our electorate no longer holds order, decency or sacrifice as important American values. Nor do they hold striving to support the common good as a value. And when it comes to paying for the nitty-gritty of things like highways, schools and other infrastructure, the majority does not believe any more in taxes as a way in which we purchase civilization.
60
It's much too soon, but hopefully one day Megan McCain will pick up where her father left off. I care less about the republican party than I do about the bipartisan establishment Senator McCain brought to the country.
We mourn his passing and we mourn what the person in the White House has done and is continuing to do to our great country.
17
@Sari Megan McCain has done nothing to deserve any kind of celebrity or any public office.
1
In a nutshell: Bush bad, Trump real bad, don't even mention anything questionable by a Democrat.
Yup, I never thought that Bush would be looked at fondly by comparison to Trump. But one thing is somewhat of an opportunity - Trump has revealed in glorious 4k HDR clarity what the Republican party is NOW. But he has also catalyzed the process in revealing what the Democratic party is (or isn't), too.
Hopefully, it isn't too late to make a course correction. Bipartisanship is gravely missing when it comes to putting America above party/tribe affiliation.
12
Party/tribe affiliation is professional wrestling in three-piece suits.
There is no returning back to whatever makes this country better than most. The "new normal," if I can use that much hated term, is a more race aware (but not knowing why in most cases) population from sea to shining sea. A population with so few of them with passports and the experience of traveling abroad and meeting people of other countries, faiths, color hold fast to beliefs given to them by whoever is in political power.
Just like any other third world country...I mean a developing nation. I am an immigrant from the Reagan era (legal, thank you very much, but maybe not according to Trump) from one such country that boasts it is the largest democracy in the world. And yet, politicians can raise a million man mob to do his her/her bidding.
All or most are dirt poor, educated and uneducated. A dozen Karl Rove's or Bannon's or "party workers" as they are called can go in and raise the ire of the crowd against the "other."
All to get voted into office. Nowadays it is religion or nationalism. But people have to be paid and bused in, I mean they have still work to put food on the table...
Does this sound familiar? When all is said and done, they are still poor and struggling but the politicians are elected and they have moved on.
4
How can there be bipartisanship if one of two major parties rejects the truth, rejects facts, rejects science, and rejects duty of office? A party that embraces racism, white nationalism, and economic isolationism? How do you reason with people like that? You can't.
The Republican party of George Bush is dead. Trump along with his henchmen from Fox News killed it. It's gone.
Today's Republican party only seeks power. The only way to defeat power is with more power. The Democrats, the perpetual Chicago Cubs, have to win so decisively that the current Republican party must be demolished and reborn into a different form. Until and unless that happens, bipartisanship is the stuff of legend.
276
@Bruce Rozenblit
You surely missed game 7. The Cubs' win was anything but decisive.
2
I agree and I feel your same frustration. But I like to think that if we returned to some of our most basic tenets, we may be able to make some headway. MLK fought immense hatred with love; Not to sound cliche or overly-sentimental, but I would urge others to employ a similar approach. You need not so much as reason with the other side as start by recognizing our common humanity, and our common human struggles at that. We're all struggling in some way. Many of us are working hard to put food on the table; put kids through school; stay in our homes; stay healthy. That we have a difference of opinion as to how those issues ought to be resolved is a tale as old as time, and isn't going anywhere. But that's okay, and that's part of the beauty of democracy. The crazy voices on both sides can drown out the more measured, rational ones. And while it takes a lot of discipline and patience to cut through the noise, I promise you they are out there. Stay curious and withhold judgment long enough to listen and, god willing, others will eventually follow.
12
@Bruce Rozenblit
"How do you reason with people like that? You can't."
Sadly, this is the exact opposite of what the nation needs. 70% of Republicans are perfectly decent people and could be persuaded to your point of view. Only 30% of the Republican party is die-hard and stuck in their views. Poll after poll shows this.
Martin Luther King was successful not because he went around calling people bigots and racists or attacking people. He was successful because he argued that the nation was not living up to its foundation aspirations. The Declaration of Independence states: "
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". MLK was able to argue that, in order for our nation to live up to its creed, it needed to ensure African Americans were not discriminated against. Liberals who are concerned should follow MLKs example and should look for an aspirational message about how their position better lives up to our founding principles and national ideals.
Put most simply: Telling people they are wrong does not work. Convincing people that your idea is better does.
I highly recommend a visit to the George W. Bush Museum on the campus of SMU in Dallas. The museum has lots of bells and whistles and asks you to step in Bush's shoes to make policy decisions based on what Bush knew at the time. When I visited, there was a cadre of likable older women docents, all of them Bush lovers who nonetheless knew that many visitors had little good to say about Bush. They sold Bush as a compassionate conservative who led this country through some of its hardest times. 9/11 and Iraq loomed large. And there was no insistence that you agree with Bush, although there was a polite request that you not demonize him. The exhibits simplify everything so they can be understood by high school students. Naturally, Bush is dressed up to be as attractive as possible. And you are urged to come away liking him even if you disagree with all his decisions. I walked away with little admiration for the man, but I had to concede that Bush was not the devil. I am quite certain that the Trump museum will fall far short.
21
Library, not museum
@michjas
Now this is an interesting vision; a Trump Museum! In my mind's eye I see a swamp or a beach front Trump Resort after the ice caps melt. Water lapping around the golf tees, putting green flags marking the water depth, while alligators eye visitors. The museum itself consists of a "most beautiful wall" surrounded by a moat. The drawbridge is guarded by staff in ICE uniforms. Once inside an amusement park complete with a coal mine, rife range, dungeon, and a "Living History Plantation" would be found. The snack bar would offer Donald's favorite flavors of Kool-Aid and golden calf sandwiches. Beyond all this lies a chapel like structure. Inside a magnificent faux jewel encrusted "T" would serve as a base for Donald's very own and very large TV. No doubt the TV would be airing a loop of "Best of Fox and Friends". The exit of course would be a plank leading out over a cliff.
2
Right. Bad policies do not pose the danger that is posed by a transgressive assault on the constitutional order and the rule of law.
33
Succinctly put. That's it in a nutshell.
The normalcy I seek is a president who understands that no American is above the law, even when that might put his party's control of Congress at risk because members of Congress from his party have been indicted. For any president prior to Trump, with the possible exception of Nixon, that concept should be clear, but for Trump, it does not even begin to exist.
27
Sometimes you need to go three steps backward to go five steps ahead.
10
The structure of a political system designed in the 18th century transported into the glare of total transparency contribute to the lack of bipartisanship. While there has been a two party system in the US stretching back to the 1790s, for the longest time deals could be struck because most constituents had no idea what precisely was going on in Washington. The advent of cable TV and the internet where every vote is tallied, relayed and can be used in campaigns against the candidate, ideological purity overrides the imperatives of practical governing.
10
@Peter J.
One of the greatest ironies of recent decades is that the push to make of politics more democratic might have actually made it more toxic and gridlocked. Makes one wonder if want we need is less transparency and less Democracy and instead more opaqueness and more Republicanism (the type of government, not party).
1
Top shelf opinion.
Trump and his like won as those who would most effected, stayed home and did not vote! We need to get out all votes this coming election. Hound you family and friends to register to vote, and get them to vote.
Rob=Bob
16
Being bipartisan was never something politicians in this country ever aspired to. Just ask Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson and Madison. And while there have been historical or expedient moments when politicians of good conscience could set aside their respective party affiliations, these were generally limited affairs. The belle that has left the ball is the ability to have reasoned and civil debate, or, in the parlance of the Senate which McCain sought to invoke, regular order. Ultimately, that is the virus Trump infects this country with - chaos, vitriol and petty, manufactured grievances - which make regular order all but impossible. If we remember nothing else from this funeral, let us remember that for all his flaws, Mr. McCain's life stood for the laudable goal of temperate, reasoned service.
22
President Bush was the best choice the country had, and he did wonderful things for liberalism. He doubled education spending - yet the propagandists bespoiling our news media still scream in anger whenever his name comes up.
Did Bush do anything overseas without the permission of Senate Democrats? No.
Did Bush put conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court? No.
Yet you smear him EVERY time you bring him up.
What happened to our shared goals was the furious Left going from liberal to hard-core progressivism with its dance with straight socialism.
What happened to Congress working together was Barack Obama's miserable health-care takeover that removed EVERY centrist Democrat from Congress to be replaced with barricade-lighters devoted to damaging the American middle class.
But do our progressive emoters in the media have MIRRORS in their homes?
8
On behalf of those who should have listened, I would like to say "We're sorry." However, I do still believe that healthcare ought to be more accessible to more people, however both sides may eventually agree that should happen. The ACA wasn't perfect. No bill is. But it was a place to start. What liberals should try to understand is the ACA required constitutionally questionable elements to prop itself up. What conservatives should try to understand is that by not even trying to fix the system for health insurance coverage, liberals are suspicious that they are bowing to corporate interests. If both sides can manage a little humility to acknowledge its own blindspots and uncertainties, and stop obsessing about just being right or "winning", then maybe--just maybe--we can come together on key issues again.
6
@L'osservatore
Gore was by far the smarter and more experienced man, and we'll never know who the choice really was.
The weird thing is that some of us knew better than to go to war in Iraq. How is that?
Bush used all the power he could muster to demonize us. He and his friends really wanted that war. It was good for their economies. We were slimed and disdained. Celebrities on our side were shunned.
And then came the war.
And Katrina.
10
@L'osservatore
This is just silly. Did Congress take the initiative to invade Iraq, or did that originate in the White House? Did education improve under President Bush? I don't think so. And it is the Republicans who like to say you can't throw money at problems. You need to illustrate the improvements in education, not simply state that President Bush spent twice as much money on education.
Roberts and Alito might be considered conservative ideologues. Neither one is a centrist; they were selected because they were identified with conservatism.
Finally [though one could go on], Gore was the superior choice, and the overwhelming choice of a majority of the voters. The left did not go from liberal to hard-core progressivism, and is hardly accurately characterized as socialist. You may not like Obamacare, but it reduced my health insurance by 50% [from roughly 40% of my income to 20%]; since Trump and the abject failure of the McConnell led Senate, my health insurance today is about as expensive as it was before Obamacare.
1
Before we take the gripes of the self-righteous wing of the Left, we should probably pause to recall how their obstinacy, and votes for a fundamentally flawed Jill Stein, helped put us here.
15
@S. Walsh
The self-righteousness of Trump voters is much worse. The self-righteousness of unreconstructed Confederates has messed up the country for well over a century.
17
@S. Walsh
I didn't vote for the fundamentally flawed Jill Stein, nor the fundamentally flawed Hillary Clinton, nor the fundamentally flawed Donald Trump. (But i did vote.) Keep putting up candidates like Clinton, and my obstinancy will continue, and i will continue to gripe (and vote as i see fit) as well.
I found Ms. Goldberg's column here to be spot-on.
Although I reject jingoism and realize the US often fails to live up to its ideals, I found myself unexpectedly tearing up when I saw my wife take the oath to become a citizen.
And while I know these phrases sound corny and possibly naive in the current day and age, I long believe there was a degree of truth in the statements that America was "a shining city on a hill" and "the last best hope on earth."
With the current president, my belief in those two statements has been profoundly shaken. It pains me greatly to realize they may no longer be true.
27
There are multitudes of political problems in our country with different origins and implications. Finding solutions requires us to identified each of these problems. The recede of bipartisanship happens long before Trump and has its origins in gerrymandering and siloing of public information resulting in hyper-partisan primary election process. A possible solution may lie in adopting "Jungle Primary" system that inherently disadvantages fringe view of an area. The blatant attack of Trump on long held civil virtues, such as racial equality, the rule of law, and the international championship of democracy, is a much greater danger to our democracy. While Ms Goldberg is correct that many past presidents sometimes did not live up to these virtues, none had actively undermined them. This behavior of Trump is best viewed as one exampleof the rise of authoritarianism worldwide driven by another complex set of factors. While there are always a segment of the population that is susceptible to the allure of dictators, I do not believe that a majority of American abides dictators. Trump was able to win in 2016 is partly because his authoritarian vices were not clearly understood. Today, most of the American people are fully awake and will start removing this dictator-want-to-be through the ballot boxes in November and in 2020.
4
@Peter: I've got to stop laughing! You make sound as if we now have a dictatorship and there's nothing we can do about it!
How wrong you are.
Please remember Trump was elected by the people who knew darn well his platform.
The majority under our Constitution elected Trump.
Or you can move to Caracas Venezuela and applaud Maduro and their socialist paradise.
Since I started following politics in the Reagan era I have only seen bipartisanship out of necessity, never out of desire, and almost entirely as Democratic comprise. As our nation descended into the oligarchy that it is, bipartisanship has become increasingly unnecessary. Another decade of the aptly Orwellian Citizens United and upward wealth distribution will seal the fate of this once-OK nation.
23
Years ago, we lived in a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, populated by mostly Liberal Democratic condo owners. One 4th of July, I was walking my two little Maltese and had them decked out in American flag patterned scarves. A resident in the elevator said, “I didn’t know we had REPUBLICAN dogs living in this building!” I was furious and asked her calmly since when did Republicans co-opt the American flag? As a Liberal and a Democrat, I get weepy when I stand for the National Anthem. I have always been fiercely loyal to my country and proud to live here. But now, not so much. Yes, Trump will be gone, hopefully sooner rather than later. But what will remain is my furor and incredulity that people I know are Trump supporters. It seems immoral not to take a stand against everything that Trump stands for and every person that voted for him and continues to ally themselves with him. I still shudder when I hear somebody say “President Trump.” I can’t like these people anymore and some of them are in my family! He will be eventually be gone, but the stench of him will remain. He has befouled our beloved country.
340
@Kathryn
I’m sorry, but for many of us boomers, love of flag and pledge was ended in the 70’s when those symbols were co-opted by Republicans like Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. They were definitely used as a signifier of Republican support and party - no aspiring politician could leave home without a little flag pin on his lapel. That many of the anti war protesters and “hippie” types also used flag disrespect to demonstrate against Nixon, Republicans, and the war only heightened this division.
For many people, these “patriotic” markers remain a political marker and an indication of conservative sympathies. (“My country right or wrong” “My country, love it or leave it”).
I’m not saying they’re always correct, but I believe many people see them that way. Hence your neighbor’s assumption.
“Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore “
Great old John Prine tune.
1
@Kathryn well said Kathryn. I love America having lived there for 17 years and now visiting regularly. Cannot talk politics with some of my dearest friends there who are totally enamoured with this man that I detest. It will takes years for the US to recover from the damage he continues to cause to the international reputation of this once great country.
I for one thought Obama and Bush were splendid in their not so veiled rebuke of the current state of the Republican party and their Grand Poobah, Trump. Watching Mitch and his ilk squirm in their seats was most satisfying. I hope, though I don’t expect, Republicans to heed McCain’s message.
While enjoying all that thanks to the foresight of the eulogized John McCain, let us not forget the impassioned eulogy of Meghan McCain. She was the fiercest of them all. She would be a worthy appointment to fill her father’s seat. I may regret saying that as a Democrat.
At the least Meghan McCain would shake up the Republican establishment in Congress and be an even louder and at times more contrary voice than her father.
39
@BMUS
You must have been watching a different Mitch McConnell. The one I saw didn't squirm, he just sat stone-faced. No public smirk perhaps, though his inner Cheshire Cat may well have been grinning with relief at bidding farewell to a thorn in his flesh. Why not? Just about everything trump does - or fails to do - is right in line with McConnell's to-do list.
As for the Meghan McCain of your expectations, she doesn't exist. Her pointed eulogy demolished trump, but only because of the animus he and the McCain family have towards each other. Temperamentally, she is her father; politically, she is well to his right, which is exactly where most of the Congressional Republicans are.
15
The bipartisan establishment plundered the little people. For decades. It didn't matter whether the Republicans were in power or the Democrats - they owed their sponsors. And their sponsors called the tune.
Over the past 50 years, how many of the so-called little people received an invite to have dinner at the White House. George Clooney received one. Jay-Z and Beyonce received one. The little people: zero.
The "bipartisan establishment" was window-dressing. The mythology was based on "We're looking out for YOU." The reality was "We're looking out for US."
17
You are right that the most disturbing thing about Trump is that he does not care about the founding principles of this country. He clearly does not believe that all men and women are created equal, or that we have certain human rights. Human rights are just another irritating obstacle to Trump’s ambition and greed.
And make no mistake, Trump’s greed and his ambition cannot be separated.
He wants to be the most famous member of the Panama Papers, even more famous and rich than Putin. But Trump has no noble ambitions either for himself or for America. Leaders like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt are annoying to Trump. They possessed actual virtues, and they saw our country as that shining city that we must strive to keep. Trump has no time for the shining city on a hill, the beacon and support to struggling democracies and people who dream of freedom. Trump wants to make America in his image - the ultra rich bully who tells every other country what to do - or else. America is better than this, as McCain said and as I think most of us believe.
45
I'm with Greenwald. Trump wasn't born from the head of Zeus. It was the bi-partisan establishment that got us here in the first place. (Greenwald's Intercept shows that both establishment teams are repeatedly still up to the same old tricks).No i don't want them back, i'll vote for a new breed.
7
@rtj
No, Trump did not come from the head of Zeus or pop up out of nowhere. Even Greenwald helped Trump to triumph, for he is far more interested in his own cleverness - and viciousness- than he is in America.
But that's no reason to ignore the clear and present danger Trump poses to America and to democracies around the world.
McCain was outspoken in support of American ideals, and tried to live up to them, but more than occasionally failed. We must do better. All of America has failed, repeatedly, to seize opportunities to understand what motivated and enabled support for Trump, and to respond forthrightly. This unworthy habit of self-delusion has to stop soon: for the sake of America, its future, and the rest of the world, which mostly tends to wish Americans well but is perplexed at how thoroughly we seem to have lost our way, our common sense, our pragmatism and even the knowledge of what has made America a blemished yet exemplary success despite more severe challenges in the past.
It is time to stop fooling ourselves, making excuses, pointing fingers, pretending there are cures without sacrifice. We need speakers, newspapers, educators, and above all Congress members fiercely dedicated to selfless and honest pursuit of the general public interest. We cannot liberate our country and posterity from the most shameful president ever, just by complaining without taking tangible, substantive action. And we cannot cure the ills of the nation simply by replacing one terrible choice of a chief executive by a less terrible or even good successor. We need to finally make a real start at ending the tenure of this wrecking ball president as quickly and cleanly as possible, and then, with urgent and fearless truth, to face and deal with the real reasons why he was able to get even anywhere near that job.
20
what our country could sorely use is a healthy dose of maturity and growing up. This tit for tat basis for discussion of almost everything is like a 3rd grade schoolyard run amuck
Be thankful for people like Beto O'Rourke in Texas (whom Ted Cruz will be conceeding to) and Elijah Cummings of Md who keep their eyes on the prize. Decency is the name of the game not normalcy.
23
If the Republicans want to hold onto their majority in the House this November, they need to remember that the voters do not want a Congress that kowtows to the president. If Republicans were more willing to stand up to Trump, to carry through with their traditional responsibilities instead of ceding them to Trump, they may not be in trouble. But, this Republican Congress has abdicated its oversight function entirely. If Republicans find they have lost their Congressional power in November, it will be because Americans expect Congress to be independent from the executive branch, not cave into it.
13
I love this column. Thank you.
(1) Here's a metaphor for what is happening. Trump is a poison who has entered the body of America. Vomiting begins as a sequence of retching contractions where nothing comes out. McCain's funeral on Saturday, along with the conviction of Manafort, and the guilty pleas of Cohen are retching contractractions that anticipate the final explosive expelling of Trump from the presidency.
(2) In a couple of months, when Trump orders the FBI to raid the offices of Robert Mueller and destroy all the evidence, there will be many honorable agents among them who will refuse to do it, or undermine the order. Some of these people are like McCain and stupidly believed in the Iraq and Viet Nam wars. But they are not duped by Trump. And this quality that Michelle talks about might just save us.
18
When presidents would express traditional American ideals in their speeches I used to ignore it as obligatory but somewhat unnecessary. Of course we all believed in freedom and equality and opportunity for all. No longer. I now see how important it is to constantly remind the country that these are the values the country stands for. Trump and the Republican party have done great, maybe permanent, damage to America's sense of itself. We may never completely recover. There is now only one party that represents the greatness that America always aspired to, and that's the Democratic party. If we are going to restore America to some semblance of what it was, we need to start in Nov 2018 and vote for Democratic majorities at least in the House. If we don't, things will only get worse.
60
I think the bipartisan establishment will return sooner than we might think. Thinking about the Trump administration is like hitting your thumb with a hammer—and it’s going to feel so good when you stop. The polls seem to suggesting that the House (and maybe even the Senate) might turn blue come November, and that would be an indicator that we are headed back toward sanity.
8
Thanks, Ms. Goldberg, for reminding us of a war that took tens of thousands of lives (actually, hundreds of thousands, inclusive of Iraqi civilians) and was initiated for completely bogus reasons. Apart from the fact that Trump supported that war- before he didn't- he really hasn't been responsible for any one episode as singularly disgraceful as that. And yet, if one takes his lies and sins, his failures and insults, his outrages and offenses and lays them end to end they already pass Dubya's misdeeds in the same manner by which a weasel is capable of outracing a skunk. The president who served in between them never dishonored the nation or disrespected those who disagreed with him. Can't we have that one back?
66
@stu freeman
The best reason for voting for Obama was to clean up the mess left by W.
His biggest failure is that he failed to stop Trump from becoming his successor.
Obama never suffered to the extent McCain did in Vietnam, but he faced his share of adversity and did it with more grace that the more outspokenly contrarian and cheekier McCain could normally muster. Obama and McCain are, however, more than a little alike in that both will be more remembered for their ideals than for their accomplishments.
Bipartisanship on its own, however, is not a worthy ideal, despite being of course usually preferable to partisanship. It is a means to end. And a worthy end for a public leader is making significant improvement in public policies, not token gestures. By this standard, Obama for all his fine sentiments, noble intentions and inspiring rhetorical was more failure than success. A big improvement over his predecessor, to be sure but not when it came to preparing for a desirable successor.
6
@Sage: During his first two years- when he was abetted by a Democratic majority in Congress- Mr. Obama accomplished at least two things of major and critical importance: he prevented our economy from falling over the precipice on which it dangled at the end of Dubya's second term, and he directed and implemented a proposal that produced affordable health care for over 20 million Americans. Not too bad all things considered. He might, however, have prevented the election of his unworthy successor had he fought for Joe Biden to win his party's presidential nomination as opposed to accepting the idea that it was "Hillary's turn."
11
Oftentimes, destruction has to come before renewal. And as devastating as those forces are, no one willingly chooses them. They are often built from seemingly disparate events - "The Butterfly Effect" - but in hindsight the relationships become clear.
So it has come to pass that overt Republican efforts to roll back the New Deal, civil rights, and equal rights, coupled with the less obvious Democratic moving to the right, seeking support from the same donor class, has wrought a tremblor to our democratic foundation. The People were ignored too long in favor of the privileged few, and they finally reacted. Since the System was broken, why not tear it down completely? And who better to break it than a man who has no understanding of government, or civics, or policy, or really anything beyond feeding his own ego?
Yes, Republicans can stand with Democrats and bemoan the state of things, but they are complicit in how things came to be. If they don't step back and acknowledge their part in this, and commit to upholding their duty to serve the People, instead of their powerful benefactors, they will be swept aside. Getting money from the rich and powerful few isn't the same as getting votes from the disenfranchised many. As each week seems to bring a surprise story of a newcomer winning election or nomination, it will soon become less a surprise than another step towards a new order. As Dylan said so long ago, but never truer than today: "The times, they are a'changin'".
18
I was moved by McCain's memorial. However, bipartisanship is long dead. Republicans killed it. Trump can do anything and Congressional Republicans will justify or praise it. Everything terrible Trump does, every way he destroys America at Putin's behest, is possible because his assault on democracy has been decades in the making. In the 1980's Newt Gingrich preached that politics was just "a war for power." He nationalized congressional elections, used Nixon's and Reagan’s white identity politics playbook, escalated their anti-intellectualism, and transformed the Republican Party. Gingrich realized that facts where enemies of Republicans as facts prevented Republicans from destroying Social Security, pushing huge tax cuts for billionaires, and radically increasing pollution. Up until Gingrich lawmakers differed on policy solutions but agreed on facts, so Gingrich attacked facts and abolished the Office of Technology Assessment which gave objective analysis on issues ranging from defense to climate. Tom DeLay, who with Dennis Hastert succeeded Gingrich, was rigging American elections. (He was convicted of money laundering, conspiracy, and violating campaign finance laws). When George W. Bush became president House Republicans effectively destroyed the legislative branch, transformed it into an arm of the executive branch, instituted the "Hastert Rule," and formalized Gingrich's ban on bipartisanship. Mourn McCain. However, Trump exists because of Republican authoritarianism.
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@Robert B
You're right about all of this. But it even predates Gingrich, tracing back to Lee Atwater, Swift-Boating, and the advent of Fox News and Rightwing talk radio. Heck, it even has roots in Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
(The Right protests that the Dems started it all with Bork; but that's a false equivalent red herring.)
33
@Robert B Thank you for reminding people about when and with whom the present dismembered state of our democracy originated. Newt Gingrich is one of the few people that I, a lifelong pacifist, wish I could put in a headlock and wash his mouth out with Ivory soap. (Wouldn't hurt tRump, either, come to think of it!)
@Paul-A
Apparently the dems are always right and the republican are always wrong?
Sure.
And that is why we have trump. You eviscerated McCain and Romney as terrible, when they see great men, just not who you wanted. I say to the dems: grow up a small realize that people can have different opinions and one of them is not always wrong, just different.
A big part of the old ''bi-partisan consensus'' was that Republicans waged partisan warfare, and Democrats pretended not to notice. The GOP could do whatever it wanted--promote and exploit conspiracy theories, collaborate with Fox, hold the country's credit hostage to political demands, steal court seats, stonewall ideas they supposedly supported if a Democrat was in power, etc--and Democrats would pretend that the GOP was acting in good faith.
Trump hasn't really changed that. If Republicans still pretend that Trump is an outlier within the party, that only helps his own self-branding as a savior from outside the system. There was quite a bit of that in Reagan when he was elected as the our first actor-president; he was not only from the extreme Right of the party, but his ignorance of issues and vulgar partisan insults were shocking at the time, though obviously almost civilized by the standards of our current entertainer-president. The media rehabilitated Reagan after he was gone (of course with no objections from the Democrats) , just as they are now rehabilitating GW Bush. The odds are good that, if we survive, they will rehabilitate Trump, and the next GOP savior will again have to be worse, to rally anew the partisan hysteria the GOP depends on.
21
For the usual, respectful period of time, it’s certainly appropriate to mourn an American hero and good Republican such as John McCain. However, the only America that needs to be mourned is Michelle’s America, not one that can command the loyalty and support of an overwhelming majority of Americans – which has yet to be re-built.
But it IS ironic that the obsequies surrounding the death of SUCH a good Republican would be the pretext for calling the events “The biggest resistance meeting yet.” It was hardly that, despite being billed as such by those who would co-opt the life and death of an effective Republican legislator to demonize Donald Trump and herald some new world order they haven’t the chops (or the votes) to summon.
And the establishment isn’t quite dead yet. On the right, the Tea Party is incrementally losing heft, with traditional establishmentarians reclaiming SOME influence and a Trumpian “something new” becoming more transactional in its behavior. On the left, though, it’s approaching death as it becomes more extreme and shrill – and likely less able to influence legislation for its Social Democratic excess.
In any event, we can’t move forward to rebuilding an America almost ALL of us can support again WITHOUT first killing-off BOTH the establishment and the power of the extremes. We can only do that by electing large numbers of centrists on BOTH sides who believe in consensus and the need for compromise.
We’re in the midst of an historical discontinuity …
4
… during which we’re trying to re-build what we once had. We use the tools that are available to us to do that, such as Trump. It won’t last forever and succeeding presidents of BOTH parties will be more publicly conformist and far less manic. One hopes that before that happens, Trump succeeds at HIS historical purpose.
@Richard Luettgen
The same gobbledygook, day in and day out. Sigh.
"...by those who would co-opt the life and death of an effective Republican legislator to demonize Donald Trump and herald some new world order they haven’t the chops (or the votes) to summon. "
Who might they be, RL? Meghan McCain? George W. Bush? Steve Schmidt? The list of serious conservatives opposed to Trump grows by the hour, as does the list of independents that will turn him out of office.
You're right about one thing, Mr. Luettgen, but only one thing: Trump does have a historical purpose. It is to make strange bedfellows of Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens. Of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Of all people, the country over, who have political thoughts beyond that of a twenty-five year old. Grow up and join us.
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@glen
What's increasing daily is a convenient resistance to Trump by most people, on politically-correct grounds, despite the fact that he's basically doing precisely what he was elected to do -- jump-start our damaged political vascular system, re-imagine our foreign entanglements on lines more beneficial to us and less predatory by others, assemble the tools necessary to dramatically increase economic activity and making it more sustainable, transforming our courts into an institution that serves appropriately as jurisprudential umpires instead of a recourse by some to legislators in robes when ideological excessives can't get what they want at the ballot-box.
It's not a bad thing that opposites are beginning to find common cause, if only, at the outset, in their shared hatred of Trump. Good that his shoulders (and backside) remain as broad as they are.
I love it when a plan comes together.
1
Our values, strength and integrity here in Canada have been brought into clear focus since Trump put us, our Prime Minister, and NAFTA in his crosshairs.
With about 1/10th the population, it may well be us, your northern neighbour who stands up and tells your so-called president that we will not bend to his will. And, we will this because we stand together as Canadians first, country before politics, ready to defend ourselves against a blow hard using us to score political points with his clattering base.
We have always been a proud nation, never boasting, always respectful and fair-minded. Trump has reminded us how important it is to stand together, to not to let anyone divide us. In may ways he has brought our nation even closer together. He has underestimated Canadians and our reserve to stand firm
in the face of strife, because this IS what democracy looks like.
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@Holly
Thanks for the positive sentiments.
Canada has in the past centuries been at odds with America, when it was French and America British, and when it was against independence from Britain and America in favor, and when the two were for a time on opposite sides of the Napoleonic wars. But that was all quite a long time ago, over 200 years now, and even then was not mainly based on any fundamental animosity between the two groups of people.
Many, probably most, Americans would doubtless be grateful if Canada could find a way to gracefully and effectively show the kind of common sense and principled pragmatism, which America itself has lately so egregiously lacked, in dealing with the most shameful US president to date.
That said, it should be borne in mind that this president is most wisely regarded as a kind of unpredictable natural disaster. The best ways to successfully survive are not by trying to reason, or courageously resisting against all odds, but by getting out of the way, having taken some sensible precautions in advance, and being flexibly ready to pick up pieces afterwards. If you Canadians manage that with a customary understated but energetic can-do spirit, your country will have achieved all that any one could reasonably hope for. If you also land a few well-deserved blows, there will no doubt be a sound of clapping from near and far, but certainly the top priority (if little else) is, we must acknowledge and hope, Trumpian: Canada first.
7
@Holly
Well said. Trump has done more for Canadian unity than anyone ever.
1
@Holly:
Thank you to our Canadian friends.
1
"Whatever comes next will have to draw on some of the ideals of honor, decency and sacrifice celebrated on Saturday."
It will. There are literally millions of Americans that are honorable, and decent, who are willing to make sacrifices to make America a better place for future generations. We see them every day at work, our neighborhoods, church, shopping, and running for public office.
I don't kid myself though, there are dark days ahead, but so many really, really good people are running for public office this year. It just brightens my day when I read about them. And so many are women, just so refreshing, and heartwarming.
I have great hope for the future.
30
The bipartisan consensus died a long time ago. The unique horror that Trump inspires on the left tends to blind one to the fact that, substantively, this administration is not that different than what one might have expected had a more mainstream republican been elected. The policy emphases are different, to be sure, but it is Trump's manner that drives so many people around the bend. I don't see why one should find more comfort in a politician who professes to be guided by the grand ideals of the enlightenment while at the same time simultaneously undermining these principles in practice, typically in our recent history through misguided foreign military adventures. Nor would I find any useful guidance in that preposterous four-day funeral extravaganza, thankfully now concluded, which told us more about the establishment's arrogance and irrelevance than it did about the supposed madman in the White House.
14
@Frunobulax I will take civilty first. then we can work out the differences. And having intelligent people at the helm helps, no matter the policy.
There was a time when the grown ups in both parties debated the merits of policies surrounding climate change for example. Now the ideolgues slam those that disagree with them.
Again time to grow up be civil agree ti disagree and run for office on the merits of public service and ideas, not how much money "your donors" will give you. (hint hint Chris Collins)
9
Ms. Goldberg seems surprised that as a liberal she has deep attachments to the American Creed. Why is she surprised? Did she somehow believe the smears of so many on the right--dating back to at least Richard Nixon--that liberals are people who don't love their country? Most every liberal I know, particularly among my peers who grew up in the 1950s, has always been aware of, and indeed has been motivated by, that creed. That's after all why we marched in the civil rights movement and why many of us opposed the Vietnam War. Honestly, I knew no one in my lower middle class neighborhood in the Bronx, (or was unaware of them if they existed), who was anything but deeply grateful to be an American, who was anything but proud of what the nation stood and fought for in WWII, who was anything but keenly aware of what The New Colossus of Emma Lazarus herself stood for--we were nearly all immigrants, or children of immigrants.
I guess she's saying that she did indeed have those attachments but was somehow unaware of how essential thay were, and are, to her. She says she's not alone, and I imagine she's right, but that just makes me sad. I can't imagine my more than seventy years as a devout American and grateful New Yorker without being always aware of my own American attachments, without being always motivated by them. Even at my most worried times, even now, my daily--and happy--awareness of that Creed keeps me going.
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The political establishment misses no opportunity to wrap themselves in rhetoric and ideals, abetted by the liberal media. There's no amount of calculated prose that can rationalize horrible governance over the last 3 decades. The game is up, the fraudulent experts are exposed and an outsider is actually re-prioritizing America for Americans. The establishment was absolutely appalled that the American people would vote against another political dynasty. If an outsider had a chance - with no establishment support and a fraction of the campaign budget, then carefully calculated plans of career politicians were in jeopardy. As a result, Trump must be undermined and removed. America had witnessed decades of rot and apologies from its leaders, covered up in hollow flourishes. If Ms. Goldberg longs to go back to the days of form over substance and great speeches covering for shoddy policies, it may be because she comes from the journalism class, that elevates words over people. Much of America prefers a strong country and strong economy over a well-worded speech. And if you can't appreciate Trump's ability to talk to people instead of talking down to them, then you are missing a great portion of his appeal.
7
@TL
I really can’t know how this is what you see in these times.
I wish you would spell out for me with some detail why you feel Trump is an improvement. I really would like to know. When you do this, tell me how future generations will benefit. If your analysis is money-based, please make that clear. Please describe what has been missing and how Trump delivers.
16
@K. Corbin: TL just did spell out the reasons. Did you not comprehend him?
WE the majority of voters are right their with TL.
The problem is fundamentalism. American values cannot be carried by ideologues and fundamentalists and their religious style hatreds of dialogue, compromise and tolerance. Trump and his base embody this fundamentalism right now.
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@Kay Johnson
Unfortunately the democrats are the same. They’re convinced that they are right just as the republicans are. And the truth lies right in the middle.
I would argue that there never was a 'bi=partisan' establishment, such as you remember it. At least within generational memory.
Mr. McCain was a genuine war hero and a uniquely American character. But he was hardly a model of a statesman (whatever you might imagine a statesman to be nowadays) having supported quite slavishly and with very few exceptions the entire republican agenda. HIs oleaginous friends Lieberman and Graham notwithstanding, McCain seemed more suited to icon than legislator.
The idea that leaders of both parties would come together in agreement that THIS administration led by THIS president (elected accidentally if not outright criminally) needs to be limited and contained and then would actually act to do so seems so farfetched as to be impossible.
What we have instead is the continuing spectacle of hypocrisy. The sage nods of the 'bi-partisan' participants and the funky presence of Jared and Ivanka all together celebrating some idealized and momentary vision of when America was supposedly still great.
The shadow that loomed over it all was, and still is, an electorate too addled to discern a reality show performer from a plausible public servant. The worm has turned, I think and there is no going back.
16
@Lkf
"...oleaginous friends Lieberman and Graham..." a masterful description. Just right.
1
John McCain’s funeral was a nostalgic reminder of a not-so-distant past in America when the government functioned as it was supposed to and the DOJ and FBI weren’t used to intimidate the opposition party or private citizens.
Former presidents often are viewed favorably to the sitting president. Richard Nixon, for all of his myriad faults, detested Russia, respected the Constitution, didn’t deem the press as America’s enemy, didn’t rely on Fox News for his daily briefings and didn’t violate the emoluments clause. George Bush plunged the economy into a recession but his inept stewardship of the country compared to #45 made the country look fondly at a president it used to revile. Barack Obama reminded Americans what it was like to have a well-read and curious president who took his office seriously, avoided scandals, valued his intelligence and law enforcement agencies and honored the rule of law and the Constitution.
Senator McCain's funeral showed America at a crossroads, with an honorable past and an awful present with a democracy on life support.
60
John McCain's long life and full career were beautifully encapsulated with the range of eulogists - Kissinger, Lieberman, Bush, Obama. Our nation has been through so much in McCain's lifetime, from the regrettable to the pride-inducing.
But Trump is his own category of terrible. An incorrigibly vindictive, selfish, ignorant, irresponsible, untrustworthy individual. Political trends come and go, but Trump has undermined basic tenants of human behavior.
I'm afraid the forty percent that love Trump will not be swayed by any call to honor the ideals that McCain held dear. They are not going to turn on Trump until they are in an economic disaster or natural disaster that directly affects them but were made much worse or caused by his policies.
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@USexpat
True, and most of them will not hear or see any of the eulogies of McCain's funeral. All they watch is FOX, all they listen to is right-wing talk radio, and those outlets were studiously ignoring McCain's funeral. People who hear and see nothing but propaganda think Trump is doing great. Sadly, unless a catastrophe in reality smacks them in the face, they will keep drinking the FOX Kool-Aid.
Megan McCain perfectly addressed the elephant in the room when she announced that her late father's America was great all along. The notions of who we are and what values we represent, while certainly improved and expanded over time, weren't up for grabs altogether until Trump reached for them. Mocking POWs and boasting of knowing more than the Generals are unacceptable for a commander-in-chief. Firing, disparaging and menacing members of the Justice Department for not doing his personal bidding are unacceptable for a president. And kissing up to or being a mouthpiece for ruthless figures like Putin are unacceptable for the leader of the free world.
Trump can hide behind all the flags he wants, but unlike his predecessors, he doesn't deserve to call himself "American."
213
Agree with everything you said, except the “leader of the free world” part.
How utterly refreshing it was to see a national event where civility and respect was expected and so diligently delivered. It was like going back to the church you grew up in, where you know the hymns and the progression of the service, and even after years of absence, you are comfortable and at home. I've had it with the tweets and name calling and picking on people for no good reason. I want my country back, not from immigrants and people of color -- I want my country back, Donald, from the likes of you.
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Sadly, after Dubya, we now have His Unhinged Unraveling Unfitness, Pres. 45 *, proving the adage 'things are never so bad but what they can't get worse' - possibly immeasurably so.
Dems/Progressives need to be sure GOP'ers and Independents know they are welcome to vote with us in November, and start taking apart what the Rolling Trumpster Fire has done to the country.
Our ideas on medical care, education, and all the rest can attract the extra voters we need, taking advantage of what GOP'ers are seeing wrong with their own party's policies in places like Oklahoma, where 15 of 19 incumbent GOP'ers have just been kicked to the curb for their FAIL in education policy and where the current GOP'er gub'ner is down to 19% approval:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/teachers-strikes-oklahoma-g...
Dems should not forget such things as Elizabeth Warren being from Oklahoma, and that at one time, Oklahoma had more Socialist Party of America chapters than any other state.
Dems need to Resist! and others will follow - Kansas ? Louisiana ? Wisconsin ?
No more judicial compromises:
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/30/17797770/chuck-schumer-trump-judicial-nomi...
And Dems should emphasize that a POTUS who would be under indictment for conspiracy if he lived at any other address in this country has no business nominating - or getting confirmed - any judges at all.
Think about it - what would GOP'ers do if things were reversed ?
41
My throat swelled when George W. Bush strode to the podium last Saturday. I have, in these pages, beaten the 43rd presidency like a piñata--and have enjoyed doing it. It isn't easy to recall how his two terms began--at the Supreme Court--or how it unfolded to where America is stuck trying to pull unsuccessfully out of two tar babies--Iraq and Afghanistan. He attempted to privatize Medicare. But.
I saw the first of two American presidents making a case for the Republic. President Bush had the reputation of being a class-cutter and a student who paid others to write his papers for him, too busy otherwise on the party circuit. But I suspect that the 43rd president's eulogy for John McCain was all his own. It had to have been. What living president, a frail and ailing Jimmy Carter excepted, could not be aware of the deep lacerations into the body politic made by Donald Trump, wielding carelessly a scalpel just to see where it will hurt the most?
President Barack Obama spoke movingly about our Constitution. In a cutting, pointed and direct rebuke of Mitch McConnell's theft of Judge Merrick Garland's SCOTUS nominations, the 44th president warned against the current political movement that would bend the levers of government so that one institution fails to either honor or recognize the other.
Your colleague Bret Stephens holds the valedictorian's wreath for his precious "bottomlessly dishonorable" definition of the Trump presidency last week.
Are we, now, who we say we are?
183
I, too, found myself unexpectedly moved listening to George W. Bush speak this weekend. While I disagreed with him on most everything, and was never convinced that he was up to the job, I also didn't think him a horrid human being, either. And that's what Trump is - rotten to the core. The antagonism, the lies, the pettiness, the irresponsibility, the incessant sleaze, the selfish and abusive takes on power; there is nothing acceptable in any of this.
I will say this for the Bush family, too - they all went up a notch in my estimation when Trump was kept from Barbara Bush's services. Funny how the insurmountable can suddenly be something one can bear.
1
It's never helpful to look back on an imagined golden age of American politics, because like all golden ages, it never existed. But listening to these two former presidents talking about American ideals in a way that president Trump could hardly conceive, let alone execute, was stirring, and reminded all of us how far our national discourse has fallen in the last two years.
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@jd: Indeed! As a nurse informed me during my last ER visit at the Tucson VA, the only thing golden about your golden years is the front of your underwear. We've always promoted and embraced ideals we couldn't always live up to. We expect government and those we elect to it to try, to aspire to those higher callings, to show us the way. Up until this one, every administration has tried, more or less, with varying degrees of success. What was pointedly illustrated by the various eulogizers was the craven depravity we've sunk to in such a short time, and the need to make corrections. I like to think their speeches contributed significantly to the growing tide of discontent and the momentum of the resistance just as public opinion has reached critical mass in opposition to the treasonous criminal currently fiddling amid the conflagration of his own making. To be sure his party, or cult, will double down on efforts to keep power and get more, but their numbers are dwindling and their audience shrinking. Their message exhibits diminishing marginal utility, especially when it's obvious they don't believe it themselves. I worry we're so far in that it may take violence and serious social upheaval to make those corrections, but we've weathered that storm a time or two before, and saw that by dawn's early light the flag was still there.
1
@jd
The national discourse falls whenever our political leaders lie to us (no matter how small) to attain office, to retain office, or even out of office.
Sometimes the lie is for the greater good (debatable) and sometimes the lie is to smooth things over, (for the proponent or the country) At any rate, it is rare to find any politician that does not ''bend'' the facts to attain a position, or speak truth to power. (especially their own)
I am not so much beholden to the discourse as I am to the facts. I want our leaders to adhere to them and for the press to follow up when they are not.
I think that is all we can ever ask for...
John McCain's request that he be eulogized by presidents Obama and Bush was a brilliant move from the "Maverick." Not only did he show how big his own character was to give prominence to the two men whose wins came at his expense, but McCain also selected two icons of their respective parties. And yet, both these Democratic and Republican speakers reminisced similarly about Senator McCain. Their anecdotes weren't identical, but they both clearly knew McCain for who he was. Partisanship took a backseat to human relationships.
The services which McCain bravely planned out were, in many ways, a beautiful parting gift to our country, including his reminders that we can respect people outside of the echo chambers.
237
@NM
Please note that ''the Maverick'' pointedly did NOT want any conservatives speaking over his casket. You have a Hard Leftists and a down-the middle centrist, plus some emotion-driven speakers sure to evoke tears.
For all his pluses, John McCain never had any use for the Reagan-style conservatives once he himself got old. He loved attention, so he played to the media, doing whatever that required.
The media paid him back in 2008 with accusations of every evil thing.
1
@L'osservatore
Get real.
Trump and his comments about McCain's POW status and his own lies, lies, lies about his faked medical status to get out of service are his own "whatever"- not conservatism.
16
@NM
Personally I think we make a mistake when we mix eulogies and politics (regardless of the person), but I understand that one that has had a political life is to be remembered in a specific light.
He was a family man that served his country well in his own way, and we should respect it all and applaud most of it. (regardless of political affiliation)
Just a thought.
1
Just superb, like your writing in general. The “Casablanca” reference made me remember sitting in the old Biograph theater in Georgetown, DC, watching a revival of the film in 1982. Aging hippies, yuppies, waiters, street characters, bikers, students bartenders, lawyers: we all rose up and cheered at the immortal “Les Marseilles” scene. I wish for that America to return again.
202
@Michael Judge— Loved the Biographer! I think I remember Casablanca playing there...
1
Wait til Stephanie Miller hears about this—She’ll be singing in French for her whole show.
The services for John McCain, if anything, breathed new life into the hope for bipartisanship.
The late Senator was remembered poignantly by Democrats like President Obama, Vice President Biden and Senator Lieberman. None of those speakers could cite a particularly harmonious legislative record with McCain, but that was secondary. Each of those men fully appreciated Senator McCain for who he was and respected why he believed what he did, and vice-versa.
Nowadays, a certain humanity is lost to political ideology, and there is no doubt that Trump's cruelty and absolutism have magnified that trend. But with the right leadership, our political representatives can return to understanding and working with those across the aisle.
10
@NM -- I doubt that the president's open disrespect for Senator McCain by raising the flag to full staff during the period of national mourning was lost on Mr. Putin. And to think that Republicans were outraged at Meghan for "throwing political hand grenades". They should have been outraged at the president's egregious behavior, but they weren't.
10
and while we are waxing in nostalgia lets not forget the older
Bush and the 1988 election campaign, featuring the Willie Horton ads which were the most overtly racist ads in a presidential race in my 60+ year memory.
110
@joelibacsi It's true. It has been so long since we were "bipartisan". Remember when Kennedy inspired us to achieve the moon and subsequent presidents continued that effort, no matter the party? That would never happen now. We can't even keep health insurance for longer than an administration or two. How can our friends trust us or our enemies take us seriously if they know the next administration will overthrow all the policies and programs of the last administration? We should not have kept the union. The traitors among us have never, will never assimilate. Bipartisanship is a fairy tale; it was never really part of the American story, at least not as deep and wide as slavery was.
10
@joelibacsik The younger Bush's campaign used racism on McCain as well, claiming he had a secret black child when in fact he had adopted a Bangladeshi child. It was very big of McCain to forgive that one. I don't think I could have.
1
@joelibacsi
the purpose of bringing up the ugliness from 1988 is exactly what please?
The Problem is that many in that cathedral Saturday, Republican and Democrat, are complicit in the rise of Trump. They could easily put the president in his place if it didn't meet their narrow interests. McCain has tried to make a final statement, but too many refuse to hear. His reservations may be too late.
76
There is bipartisanship in working towards a common goal while figuring out on the most efficient and cost effective way to go about it. THAT is how government is supposed to work of the people, by the people and for the people.
Then there is one side trying to take away something, while the other side is trying to save it. That could be a way of life, a job, health care, education or lately in particular - human rights.
When that one side says no to having stuff taken away, then they are called partisan, or a whole bunch of derogatory slurs denouncing them as not American.
When the other side slows down, or stops for a second from taking away stuff (again in particular human rights) then they are called ''moderate''.
No, I do not want to go back to the way it was before.
15
@FunkyIrishman Don't kid yourself. Both sides are happy to see the rich take away from the poor. Both sides talk a good game, but neither wants to take any action at all. Congress dumps its responsibility for war on the president and for laws on the supreme court. No one in congress wants a solution to, say, immigration, because that takes away an issue they can use as a club. Same for most real problems we have - they essentially boil down to campaign finance and our representatives' deep ties to other than the voters they should represent.
9
The worst part, my friend, is that even in recent memory, Republican ideology wasn't quite as absolute as now.
Take even healthcare. The unmistakable precedent for Obamacare was Romneycare, instituted by then-Governor Mitt Romney. The Romney who believed in guaranteed health coverage until he made President Obama into a foil.
Or immigration reform. John McCain and Marco Rubio were once champions, and then-President George W. Bush supported it too. The emergence of the Tea Party (which, yes, McCain precipitated with the horrendous choice of Sarah Palin) made that a lost cause, and turned GOP primaries into purity tests.
Is bipartisanship again possible? Yes, but
Republicans have to first see that it doesn't pay politically to adhere to far right absolutism. Campaign finance reform would help, as would tremendous pressure from voters.
I will vote, and I will also hope that the pendulum will swing back towards the middle.
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@Chip
I never kid meself or any other. I don't doubt that there are republicans and republican lite members that are beholden to money backers, but the majority of the Democratic party is not. That is changing even more so this election with some truly Progressive candidates.
War votes are one thing (after 911) but again, President Obama went to Congress for action in Syria, but they said no. (the majority being republicans)
Immigration reform WAS resolved back in 2013 when a bipartisan group (again mostly Democrats) passed a bill in the Senate dealing with all issues, and a path to citizenship, but republicans/the Speaker did not even allow it to come up for a vote.
I can appreciate false equivalencies, but the differences between the two parties are becoming more and more stark.
Regards.
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I think "returning to normal" - with all its weaknesses - after trump is gone, is a complacent hope of some, but what's a stronger hope is that the American people will demand some reformation of the fragile and outdated electoral process that helped create trump. Further, the mighty influx of leftists and women and non-whites into politics and elected office in 2018-20 has enormous promise to transform or replace the Democratic party. There will be nothing normal about that. The more unsettled question is what happens to the Republican party.
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@Murray Bolesta The republicans will actually figure out how to get voters back using fear, especially those voters who don't really want to find out what others' pronouns are and whose lives matter, and who got #metooed and who's a dreamer. Your various slice and dice is not making the friends you think it is. Good secure jobs for decent living wages. That's the secret sauce.
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@Murray Bolesta My sad intuition is that they're not giving up their hegemony without violence. And this makes me very pessimistic about the future of our Union.
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