Editor's Note: Since the publication of this article, HuffPost has updated their version of the article to say, "McCain will die with this dishonor." However, the article has the same line on the site commondreams.org.
Liberals are not above kicking people when they are down, especially if it’s a Republican politician. Even Senator John McCain, recently diagnosed with glioblastoma, is no exception to the rule.
The outpouring of sympathy for John McCain turned sour yesterday when the senator cast the deciding vote to allow debate for repealing the Affordable Care Act. Liberal journalists who had formerly tweeted out their sympathy for McCain retracted their well wishes very quickly. HuffPost contributor Peter Dreier went all out, writing in an article that McCain will have a different legacy than that of Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, who passed away in 2009.
Dreier stated that “McCain will die with dishonor. Rather than do the right thing, he did the right-wing thing.”
His reason for such an uncharitable outburst? While Kennedy “helped elect Barack Obama as president and urg[ed] him to make universal health care a top priority,” McCain did not partake in such liberal glory.
Instead, the Republican senator “was a coward” who agreed to allow a political bill to stand for debate on the Senate floor. (As for "coward?" Reminder: McCain spent over five years being tortured in a North Vietnam prison.) To be clear, the criticism isn’t stemming from McCain voting against the ACA or for a Trump policy, but rather from his decision to debate an Act, which is standard procedure for both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Dreier, a politics professor at Occidental College, would like to discredit all of Senator McCain’s military service as well as his service as a member of the Senate, simply because McCain “put loyalty to his party, to Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell, and, unbelievably, to President Trump over loyalty to his country and the needs of his fellow citizens.”
So McCain had the affrontery to disagree with Dreier, and to allow debate, For that, he is dishonored. Worse, he committed the ultimate mortal sin: supporting President Trump (never mind that McCain has been highly critical of Trump). Dreier himself apparently mourned over the 2016 election results many a time, as he stated in a previous article. So it’s hardly surprising that he’d target McCain with such hateful, uncharitable language.
Nor is it surprising to find this opinion in the Huffington Post. Rather than follow its liberal peers in offering sympathy and condolences to the Senator upon his diagnosis, the site published an article criticizing those who encouraged him to fight. The article had the politically correct headline: “Cancer Doesn’t Choose Who Survives Based On How Hard Someone Fights.”
The ultimate kick in the face of McCain and all other Republicans could be found in Dreier’s byline: “His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. Ted Kennedy, but not John McCain, is included in the book.”
Do liberal snowflakes advocate human decency at all?
