Alex Pareene describes a recent town hall meeting of Grandpa John McCain vs. Constituents.
McCain was heckled and aggressively questioned at the Phoenix meeting. One man used marshmallows as a prop but most questioners had pretty straightforward arguments, like “we do not want another engagement in the Middle East.†John McCain promised that this would not be a real war, meaning a war in which Americans would be in any danger of dying in large numbers, but rather just the sort of minor, small-scale military action that will probably just kill a lot of Syrians. This did not seem to satisfy his critics. One of them had a particularly pointed, but sort of misdirected message:
“We didn’t send you to make war for us. We sent you to stop the war,†one man said to applause.
My question is this: Why would you send John McCain anywhere to stop a war?
That’s a good question!
Anywhere besides “retirement,†I mean? Arizonans have been sending McCain to Washington (well, they haven’t been sending him there — he lives there — but they have been asking him to represent them in Congress) for a quarter-century now, or longer if you count his time in the House. In that time he hasn’t been consistent on much, but one thing he’s always been steadfastly in favor of is war. He’s never heard of a proposed military intervention he didn’t immediately support, or not support mainly because it wasn’t a big enough military intervention.
Some Republicans pull a bait-and-switch of sorts, as when George W. Bush campaigned against Clinton-style foreign interventions and then started a couple of horrible, endless wars, but you know what you’re getting with a guy like John McCain, a man who sings fun songs about the countries he wants to bomb. Mother Jones made a map of the countries John McCain has wanted to bomb or invade over the last 20 years. There’s a lot of them!
At least they’re all in the other hemisphere.