Time to Retire, John

I suppose that it is worth the words to go ahead and thank Sen. John McCain for his long service to the USA.  No one, not even someone who steps up to serve his country knowing the risks, should have to suffer years of incarceration as a POW in the heck-hole that was a North Vietnamese prison camp, as the senator did during his military service.

And although there are immense perks that go with the office and length of service, we should thank him as well, or at least the people of the State of Arizona should, for his long tenure as the senator from that great state.  We should thank him for running for president against Barack Obama in 2008, although he failed to expose Obama for what and who he was and, accordingly, lost -- leaving us with Obamacare, the Iran deal, ISIS, a reinvigorated Russia, countless leftist judges and Black Lives Matter, the last of which Obama clearly allowed to happen.

But it is time -- it is SO time -- for Senator McCain to step down gracefully from the national stage and be with his family and take care of the cancer that he is again suffering from.  It is, we can argue, long past that time.

As evidence #455 of that, I give you this excerpt from his speech earlier this week somewhere to some audience.  In a direct message to President Trump , McCain gave us these words:

"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history."

I challenge you to diagram that sentence.  OK, you may be too young to know that in the bygone days of schooling we used to diagram sentences to identify parts of speech, which may be why kids today can't write a coherent sentence.

But I digress.

I'm going to try to extract one of the 17 points McCain was trying to make in that grammatical challenge, so he should forgive me if I don't quote his intent properly.  That point is that, under President Trump, we have, he says, "refused the obligations of international leadership", because we are excessively nationalist Americans who don't want to solve world problems.  That, he said, is unpatriotic.

That, Senator, is just wrong.  Now, you may think you have a better sense of what constitutes "leadership" in the world, and think you have a better sense of the USA's role in the world than I do, but I'm thinking that maybe you don't, and any American's opinion is as valuable as yours.

I have thought for a long time that the United States of America was a grant by God to the world, so that there would always be one nation on earth where people could see what happens when the shackles are taken off the ambition of the individual.  We are not so much the beacon of freedom to attract people to enjoy it here, but the demonstration of the success of freedom so that other lands can enjoy it there.

That more nations have not adopted our Constitution as the foundation of their own republics is not an indictment of its inadequacies.  It is, rather, a triumph of corrupt power unwilling to grant to its people the right to self-determination.

So our role in international leadership, Senator, is a nationalist one.  It is for us to unshackle our people repeatedly, continually and visibly.  A better USA is the great commercial for our way of life everywhere else.

And our role, to a certain extent, includes defending the oppressed in other lands against the internal powers there who would subjugate them.  It is why we have participated in the removal of the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Saddams, the Khaddafis.  It is why when we have failed to do so, the Pol Pots and Kims have murdered their people and created repressive dictatorships.  And it is why we must continue to demonstrate to Russia and China (and their people) that our way of life is a way of freedom and success.

This is not "spurious, half-baked nationalism" being practiced in the refreshing new Administration.  It is a clear understanding in this White House that what we do within our borders -- and, of course, that we have borders -- matters as much or more beyond them.

If you don't get that, Senator McCain, if you have let your personal disaffection with this president color your capacity to legislate in the best interest of the people of the State of Arizona and of this nation, then you have no real choice.

Retire tomorrow, Senator, and take care of yourself.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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