Taibbi: Why Did John McCain Continue to Support War?

by Paul on August 28, 2018 at 11:17am

Matt Taibbi writing at Rolling Stone:

But he did have one unshakeable conviction: Wherever America had a foreign policy problem, the solution was always to bomb the fuck out of someone.

Long before he became a symbol of anti-Trumpism (despite having contributed significantly to the Trump phenomenon by unleashing Sarah Palin on national politics in 2008), McCain defied the mainstream GOP to support Bill Clinton’s air strikes in Kosovo. McCain wanted to go even further to a ground invasion, if necessary.

People forget, but it was this episode that first elevated McCain to media-icon status as an elected official. “We’ve turned down more than we’ve accepted,” he said in 1999, speaking about interview requests. “Five times as much.”

From that point on, he was the torchbearer for the purest bipartisan value that exists in Washington: military interventionism. He never saw an invasion he didn’t support, and it’s sadly fitting that the last piece of legislation to bear his name was a massive military spending hike that scored the rare trifecta of support from mainstream Democrats, Republicans and Donald Trump.

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