Think Trump is Just an Accident?

Here's a fascinating excerpt from the Washington Post (behind a paywall) that I saw this morning at Daily Kos, quoting that celebrated maverick and media darling, John McCain:

"Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the elder Republican statesman, said President Obama was “directly responsible” for the terror attack in Orlando due to his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group. 

“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures,” McCain said. 

“He pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked, and there would be attacks on the United States of America,” he said. “It’s a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.”

I have said for quite a while here that Trump is not some accidental occurrence, but that he is a totally predictable outcome of the hatred and lust for violence that the Republican party has been knowingly generating for decades.  And I know that I don't have to tell you this, because I know that most of the people that come here agree with me.  But now, with a Republican who is universally hailed as one of the reasonable voices in the Republican party openly parroting Trump's most disgusting subversive lie, I never again want anyone to tell me that there is a single honest, sane person in the Republican party.  Even the ones who appear slightly less extreme, like Rubio or Kasich, or, you might have thought, McCain, are dishonest con men who are doing nothing but trying to carve out a niche for themselves, saying whatever they think will give them a constituency.

Well, I know all that, so I'm not sure why this latest behavior of McCain's came as a shock to me, but it did.  I couldn't have imagined that this guy, who has been personally savaged by Trump, could be so low as to stoop to this kind of malignant lie, to support Trump's candidacy. But there it is.  Be as cynical as you want; you will never be cynical enough to really see the Republicans for what they are.


A little more:  I should have added to this account something which many people do not seem to know, but which John McCain knows as well as he knows his own name:  The agreement to remove US troops from Iraq was made not by Obama but by George W. Bush. When Obama was elected, he tried to renegotiate the agreement, but the Iraqis would not agree.  So, not only was McCain guilty of a contemptible smear of Obama, it was a lie too.

And while we are on the subject, this is not the first time McCain has cravenly sided with a Presidential candidate after that person had viciously attacked him; Bush subjected McCain to some absolutely abominable racist smears in 2000, after which McCain, like a good little Republican, took the kick in the face and got right back in line.