John McCain is pretty pissed off at the guy who said he wasn’t a war hero because he went and got himself captured.
Just listen to the Senator’s reaction to Trump’s contention that the media is the enemy of the American people:
'That's how dictators get started': @SenJohnMcCain defends the free press in exclusive @MeetThePress interview pic.twitter.com/yUINj0plIU
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 18, 2017
That’s right, McCain said “that’s how dictators get started.”
Now there are a lot of things you can say about McCain, but I’m not going to get into all of that here because it’s a long discussion and we’d have to bring in Ukraine and Syria and all kinds of other geopolitical rabbit holes that I don’t want to jump down lest this should turn into a 5,000 word diatribe.
Rather, I just want to highlight the speech McCain delivered at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Friday.
Below is a partial transcript presented without further comment.
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The next panel asks us to consider whether the West will survive. In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism. Not this year. If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.
This question was real, half a century ago, for Ewald von Kleist and the founders of this conference. Indeed, it is why they first started coming to Munich. They did not assume the West would survive, because they had seen its near annihilation. . . .
What would von Kleist’s generation say if they saw our world today? I fear that much about it would be all-too-familiar to them, and they would be alarmed by it.
They would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism.
They would be alarmed by the hardening resentment we see toward immigrants, and refugees, and minority groups, especially Muslims.
They would be alarmed by the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.
They would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.
But what would alarm them most, I think, is a sense that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West–that they see it as a bad deal that we may be better off without–and that while Western nations still have the power to maintain our world order, it is unclear whether we have the will. . . .
All of us must accept our share of the blame for this turn of events. We grew complacent. We made mistakes. At times we tried to do too much, and at others we failed to do enough. We lost touch with many of our people. We have been too slow to recognize and respond to their hardships. We need to face up to these realities, but this does not mean losing hope and retreating. That we must not do.
I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. That is not the message you heard today from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. That is not the message you will hear from Vice President Mike Pence. That is not the message you will hear from Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. And that is certainly not the message you will hear tomorrow from our bipartisan congressional delegation.
I thought “old John” had lost his country to his party, we will see if he can get his country back. He has a long way to go.