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McCain’s Mutiny

Posted on July 29, 2017 by
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Andrew Davidson

I’m pretty sure I posted disparaging stuff on social media about him rushing out of hospital to put in his vote to make it go to the vote.

Totally wrong about him. Well done that man. You done good.

jdman

Theres more to McCains reversal than meets the eye, i still not convinced his decision was for altruistic reasons,

But irrespective of his reasons the correct outcome was acheived, watching those arseholes heads go down in the senate was a thing of joy to watch when he dramatically gave the thumbs down!

X_Sticks

Yes, Chris, definitely the highlight of the week.

The GOP was gobsmacked when McCain voted No. Trump looked in danger of an exploding head.

Really liking his new communications guy too. Anyone that can make Emily Maitless squirm like that is worth watching. Looks he’s going to be the man that wields the knife for Trump metaphorically speaking.

Cactus

Posted by Chris Cairns…

Who’s the chap on right, he gets access to dentalcare too!

Like a spitting image character.

Morning.

Cactus

Ahh, so that’s McCain on the rhs..

Wonder if he likes chips.

Croompenstein

Can he come and save the English NHS..

Good to see you jdman 🙂

Grouse Beater

Trump’s lair could be dismissed as a bunch of narcissists and imbeciles if you didn’t sense the more they fail, and fail spectacularly, the more they are motivated to divert attention by starting a war somewhere. Worrying.

Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring – yes, barring – state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem.

Colbert’s satirical response is an instant classic:

“This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

Your weekend reading

By popular demand: link to wp.me
Despicable Me 3: link to wp.me

Article on banning dirty engines to follow…

ronnie anderson

McCains Traveling to Molar City in Mexico for cheaper Dental treatment , they should have tweeted they’re votes before hand that would certainly have given the Trump the hump .

Jack Collatin

Brill, Chris.
The paranoid madness gripping the US right now recalls Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in ‘The Caine Mutiny’.
Picture a mad man in charge of a Big Boat wi’ guns who demands an investigation into strawberries missing from the larder in the middle of the Battle of the Pacific.
Van Johnson relieves Bogart of his command and prevents disaster, but still is put through a court martial before Jose Ferrer exposes the Madness of Queeg on the stand.
John McCain played the Van Johnson part yesterday.
Trump is clearly on another planet now.
I doubt that he’ll last much longer.

Betty Boop

@jdman

Agreed. Never trust their motives, but, he has stopped this piece of malicious and incompetent political tomfoolery in its tracks for a wee while.

Good to see you about; give our best to your OH.

ronnie anderson

My Friend Bill.

How do you hide
from an endless hoard
trying to steal
your bit awe cardboard

how can you sleep
with an empty belly
of rotting claes
torn and smelly

how you pray
for death to be free
from this endliess life
of westminster auserity

i just need hope
some kind awe life
to end this constant
and daily strife

please reach out
give me your hand
once more like a human
please help me to stand

i will curl up here
in ma wee spot
and i will remember
this is all i have got

😀 Bill Glen

Ken500

McCain is a warmongering pycho bastard, responsible for more deaths than anyone. The US military machine. Illegal wars, financial fraud and tax evasion. Ruining the world economy. Wasting £Trns.

Obamacare puts the burden on the poorer. A Liberal Independent wanted no public money spent on it. So much is spent in the military the US. They can’t afford a genuine public healthcare or education system. £Trns in debt. Their economy will go down taking the world with it. Caused the worst migrationcrisis in Europe since 11WW. Some of them want to start a war with Russia, including McCain. Another distraction.

[…] Source: Wings Over Scotland McCain’s Mutiny […]

James Caithness

McCain will have remembered what Trump said about him during the campaign. Trump didn’t like those that got captured.

McCain’s got him back.

mumsyhugs

Welcome home jdman! 🙂

Posted by Rev Stuart Campbell??? You’ve progressed from stick men – must have been taking lessons from the maestro Chris Cairns!

Macart

@idman

Pretty much and good to see you.

Great work Chris.

Famous 15

Jack I laughed out loud at your comment about the Caine Mutiny and then I stopped laughing.

Bogart was terrifying. Trump is …

Tinto Chiel

Revenge is sweet. Whatever you think of McCain, Trump’s comments on him as a POW were despicable. Trump’s hair is excellent, Chris.

Nice to see you again, John King, and X_Sticks.

Brad Millar

i despise both men with a passion, McCain and his pal senator Murphy likes going to Ukraine and incite neo nazi volunteer battalions like Azov to attack Donbass and they attack civilian areas, their are pictures of McCain shaking hands with the leader of isis in Syria in 2012 because Isis was founded and funded by the cia to topple Assad.

it tells you something about America and McCain when they are buddies with a Ukraine that made WW2 nazi war criminals national heroes who killed between 100 – 300K Poles and over 50K jews during WW2 … these are the people McCain and co support

heedtracker

Orange Hitler.

Who was first to pay homage to Orange Hitler? toryboy UK, all loving record by their beeb gimps.

David Smith

There’s no justice in the world when someone like McCain is still thriving as many of his compatriots in the Vietnam war struggle to get anything.
This man and his Chicago School co-defendants are the reason the world is ablaze today.
He’s no example to hold up.

Dan Huil

Remember britnat brexiteers in Westminster are depending on the likes of Trump.

X_Sticks

@Tinto Chiel

Hi Tinto, never been away 🙂 Just grandstanding most of the time and chomping through the popcorn while chucking out short sharp tweets. The twattery of twitter suits my available time these days. JD spends a fair bit of time there too.

Jack Collatin

Agree with all of the above.
McCain Rescuing Obamacare from the Evil Trump is akin to describing the Allies’ Stalin as liberating Poland from the Evil Hitler.
The world is on the Edge of Darkness, and I for one will not sit back while Liam Fox and the American, Boris Johnson, negotiate under the guise of ‘trade deals’ to have England and any of its colonies who stand by and let it happen, subsumed into the US as the 51st State.

They’ll be re-opening their Holy Loch Base by April 2019 if we do nothing, which is not an option, so don’t contact your portfolio manager to buy shares in Dunoon Taxis just yet.

What the fuck is Dugdale and the Scottish Branch Up to?
At least Carwyn Jones, who is a disaster in Wales otherwise, is uniting with the Holyrood Administration in a joint attack on WM Brexit intransigence.

All we hear of Dugdale is about her latest romance, and that she is having the pants sued off her by some vile Cybernat blogger who is a blog bully and pest for exposing the ‘only politics’ untruths of the Loyal Defenders of the English Ascendency on a daily basis.

David

This is interesting:

link to twitchy.com

No fan of Trump, but as the father of a disabled child myself I don’t see what he did wrong here. JK seems to have made a wee booboo here jumping in with both feet.

Bit different when you’re not playing in the UK’s one-sided media, eh?

Helena Brown

Many Republicans are being told by their constituents to watch it over Obamacare and as many will be up for re-election, they are listening, at the rate Trump is going he will have done nothing except make the Party he supports unelectable for years to come. Maybe we need his sort in Westminster, oh wait we have.

Valkyrie

Not just McCain. Two female Republican senators were ahead of him in this but not getting the press coverage.

mogabee

Brad Millar and Ken500

You have said all I wanted to say on McCain. USA has no right to be the world’s policeman.

Tinto Chiel

X_Sticks: Wings’ loss.

Auld Rock

Scaramucci looks like someone straight from the ‘Mob’, mind you coming from NY hardly surprising. Funny as we all might find Chump’s travails unfortunately it is deflecting attention from May’s clowns.

Auld Rock

Carnyx

McCain is a mass murder happy to support anyone from neo-nazis in Ukraine or Jihadis in Syria so long as it brings his long desired World War III closer. McCain lobbied to invade Iraq, bomb Libya, policies that have lead to 1.5 million deaths, he supports the current bombing and starvation of Yemen by Saudi (big contributers to his foundation) and daily harrowing of Gazans, the sooner he is dead the better for everyone on the planet.

link to fair.org

pool9

A view from an interested American.

This is long. Apologies.

Republican senators Murkowski and Collins deserve the credit, not McCain. Those two ladies have had their entire party pressuring them for weeks, if not months to shift their positions, and they have refused. They opposed this legislation in all its varied forms from almost the get go. But thank god he joined them to be the decisive vote. Credit where it is due, but withoiut them, his gesture is meaningless, and, as detailed below, it was done not without other political calculations, I believe.

McCain could have killed the Thursday vote earlier by voting No on the motion to proceed but he didn’t. This allowed Republicans to enjoy the illusion of progress, and to show their all important base, that they were ‘fighting’ to get things done.

There are probably 6-10 other Republican Senators who did not want to vote yes on Thursday. McCain provided cover for them by being the guy who voted No, so one of them didn’t have to, if they had the testicular fortitude those ladies had already demonstrated. Ovaries for the win it seems. McCain, even if he didn’t have almost certainly fatal brain cancer, was not going to run for another term anyway. He has nothing to fear from the Republican base.

Those, say, other 8 senators who were inclined to vote No got to vote yes to a horrific piece of legislation which would have denied health insurance to 16 million+ americans by 2018. They did it to appease the Republican base in their states, and to avoid being primaried*(see note below) at the next election. So they did not believe in the proposed law, but voted for it out of expediency, to keep their ideological credentials intact to the increasingly right wing base. This may be nuts, but it is a political reality right now.

Terrible legislation almost got passed, with a pinkie promise from Speaker of the House Ryan that they would take the bill into conference (that is to have a debate among Senators and Representatives to try together to craft a piece of legistlation that would satisfy both Houses of Congress. As each house has struggled to pass any kind of legislation on its own, how they were going to be able to magically all agree this time around was a bit of a mystery, but given the Republican’s ability to close ranks around terible ideas, not an impossibility. The conference phase could fail, but that would leave the House with the ability to just pass the bill the Senate had sent to conference i.e. the Thursday night bill, that barely had the ink dry on its roughly sketched ideas.). The three Senators that voted no recognised that the House could ignore that promise to go to conference, and pass the bill the Senate passed and hand it to big Donnie to sign into Law. Given the strength of the Freedom Caucus (hard core right wingers) in the House of Representatives, that was, thankfully, too much of a risk for those three Republican senators to take – they recognised the human and political cost of such an action. Others in their party don’t care as much about the human cost, only the political as it pertains to them.

Why?

Many in the House of Representatives, thanks to gerrymandering and successful voter suppression laws, are totally safe from electoral consequences, and so are free to go as far right as they wish. (yes there has been democratic gerrymandering in the past, but currently it is the R’s that are hugely benefitting from redistricting, at state and federal levels. Gerrymandering must be removed, but to be removed it needs to be voted out by politicians sitting in gerrymandered seats. Houston, we have a problem.)So, there are no personal political repercussions to them in voting in a horrible law. Or at least that is what they believe, and so far they have been proven right by the American voter, those able to get to the polls, that is.

This is an essential, terrible flaw at the heart of US democracy right now, and a big part of the reason why politics has been able to go so far right, and become so polarised. Voter suppression laws have been passed in many red states, and gerrymandering was rife after the 2010 census, tilting the electoral map very Red in the House of Reps. This badly needs reformed, the question is, how? How bad does it need to get before people see what has become of the electoral process? How do we get reforms past politicians who depend on flawed electoral processes to keep their seats? It is ugly. And a Republican dominated Supreme Court means law suits will become meaningless also. It is a nightmare.

*Being primaried.

For those of you who don’t know. (and who have managed to read this far!) Each election cycle the main political parties in the US have primary elections, often purely within the party, sometimes open to independents, to select their candidates for the general election. Being ‘primaried’ in the Republican party nowadays means a more right wing politician gets money and backing to oust a politician that the base and the big donors don’t like or think have failed them (like by voting No to certain bills!). Repealing Obamacare was a central plank of the Republican platform, voting against it means a likely challenge from within your own party at the next election, from a candidate more ideologically pure, which currently means even more right wing.

For example: Eric Cantor was for years the smarmy face of right wing Republicans, and House Majority Leader when he was successfully primaried by a challenger supported by the Tea Party and Talk Radio, who claimed Cantor had gone ‘soft’ after getting into a leadership position. Any compromise, or whiff of it was bad, and Cantor looked like he might be considering policies unacceptable to the base, and was kicked out. His loss scared the bejesus out of other mainstream and long-tenured Republican politicians, who have subsequently sought to pander to the base even more. The politics of fear and capitulation in action. Being primaried is a real fear, and keeps many Republican politicians in line when it comes to key votes that could be used against them in the next primary election cycle.

So: McCain provided cover for other Republican senators who didn’t like the bill, but who for political reasons (fear of being primaried) were prepared to vote for it in order to preserve their own politcal careers. Craven dogs that they are. It is estimated that between 27 and 45 thousand Americans would die every year if they lose the coverage they currently get due to Obamacare. That is what those people are prepared to vote for, in order to keep their job, and the Platinum plated guaranteed for life healthcare that House members get. The irony of people on guaranteed government healthcare voting to deny any kind of health coverage to their fellow citizens, and that will cause many of those citizens to die earlier that they otherwise would have, is thick enough to choke on.

The McCain maneuver also allows the Republican Party as a whole to turn to their base and say “Hell, we tried – but those unruly women and that unreliable cancer-ridden RINO (Republican In Name Only) decided to pee in our wheaties, damn them! We just need three more Senate seats and we can do this!” So, sadly, the Republicans could still turn this defeat into a message to try to get their base turned out at the next election. Even in defeat they can find a way to win.

American politics in in a bad place, at its foundation as much as at its peak. Currently only a combination of incompetence and division with factions of the Republican Party are keeping things from getting much much worse.

In my opinion, of course! Have a great day!

Sarah

@pool9 at 7.56 p.m.
Thank you very much for your excellent post. It has given a clear picture of the political scene in USA – I hadn’t appreciated how bad it is NOR how similar to the sorry state of affairs in Westminster parliament.

Our current crop of politicians in the Labour and Conservative parties are poor quality and lacking in moral strength. They too seem to put personal income and party ahead of the needs of the populace e.g. our health service, Brexit,environment etc etc etc

Petra

@ Pool at 7:56pm ….

Thanks a million for taking the time to post on here.

VERY ENLIGHTENING AND MUCH APPRECIATED.

Liz g

Pool @ 7.56
Thank you very much for that excellent and informative post.
I do hope that you can find time to post more and keep us updated.
As I guess you know,we can’t believe a word from the media.
It’s folks like you who are kind enough to share what they see going on that keeps us informed…. thank you again.
And all the best with your health care system, I hope it all works out for you!

Cactus

Hey Liz g x

Mwah mwah xx

Pool cool.

K1

Thank you pool, as others have said, for your very informative post. Good to get a straight view and insight into the ongoing madness that is the R party and of the general electoral gerrymandering that has taken place in America.

Gives one the feeling that our so called western democracies are well and truly failing our populations…these rightbwingers have a lot to answer for in creating economic chaos and human misery on an epic scale…

We all must keep up the good fight though…both sides of the pond.


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