Here are my observations and opinions of selected news of the day.
My Jon Kyl coffee mug.
A TRUE REPUBLICAN RETURNS – Former Sen. Jon Kyl, who served as Arizona’s senator for 18 years before retiring in 2013, has been named to fill the vacancy of the late John McCain by Gov. Doug Ducey. A perfect choice.
I had the pleasure of knowing Jon while working in my public affairs capacity. My wife and I regularly attended his Saturday morning coffee sessions in Phoenix, where we got to know Jon and his wife, Caryll.
A solid conservative with legal credentials, we often thought of Jon as an ideal nominee to the Supreme Court. Recently, he was seen as he accompanied Judge Brett Kavanaugh while making the rounds of the Senate. And he spoke of his friend McCain during ceremonies in the State Capitol.
MORE REFLECTIONS ON MCCAIN the man and his week-long farewell continue to appear in the media and the blogs. I commented on a few of them here in my September 3, 2018 post.
The hypocrisy of some politicians and the media was the subject of an op-ed by Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today, “Sen. John McCain’s funeral put Washington’s vicious political hypocrisy fully on display.”
“Hypocrisy, they say, it’s the tribute that vice pays to virtue. If so, then much tribute was paid this weekend,” said Reynolds.
Writing about Saturday’s gathering of the Washington establishment, Reynolds wrote, “they came not to praise McCain, but to bury Trump. And yet, despite solemn encomia to civility, honor and integrity from the likes of Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger, amplified by the presses Greek chorus, the notion that we use to live in some golden age of civility and bipartisanship exemplified by the career of Sen. McCain is belied by, among other things, the career of John McCain.”
“When he (McCain) was alive, and a threat to other people’s power, he was treated as a racist, a warmonger, and potentially unstable. He was often vilified by the press,” recalls Reynolds.
“The contrast between the outpouring of love for McCain in his last days and the astonishing vitriol directed at him in 2000 and 2008 demonstrates once again how disingenuous, low, and cheap American politics were well before Trump came on the scene.” David French, National Review
“I suspect the voters are onto the game,” Reynolds concludes.
ANOTHER VIEW – “Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much greater than the 2008 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example,” wrote Spengler in Asia Times, “The American establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.”
Noting the New Yorker’s reference to the funeral as “the biggest resistance meeting yet,” Spengler said, “The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the establishment to show it dudgeon at the ‘pointedly uninvited President Trump.’”
Writing about Meghan McCain’s take down of President Trump, Spengler seems to see it as an exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of the elite’s policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.”
“Trump is hated because the American people elected him to bury the establishment. Last weekend the establishment obliged by conducting burial services for itself.” – Spengler, Asia Times
SPEAKING OF HYPROCRISY -Former President Obama, the man who said he was going to “fundamentally transform the United States of America;” the man who had difficulty saying that he believed in American exceptionalism, was personally asked by Senator McCain to give a eulogy at his service in the National Cathedral.
Yet Meghan McCain saw fit to slam President Trump’s motto of making America great again to say that John McCain’s America is great.
Kaepernick insults the police with pig socks. Note the Nike swoosh. (independentsentinel.com)
ISN’T IT IRONIC that Colin Kaepernick, the guy who was standing up for oppressed blacks against law enforcement officers and wore socks depicting the police as pigs, has no problem signing on with Nike, the company that has been criticized for having its shoes made by oppressed people in Asia.
I recently purchased a pair of Nike-made shoes, and I am not going to burn them as some people are doing in response, but I will not purchase another product with the Nike swoosh.
May God bless the United States of America.
