Senator John McCain : GOP Anti-Trump Elitist? Progressive Mole in the GOP? Or an Old Man Who Should Retire?

Arizona Senator John McCain pounced on President Donald Trump Friday during a speech at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany, at one point comparing today's political atmosphere to the Nazi years of the 1930s and 1940s. Newsmax journalist Jason Devaney reports that McCain never mentioned President Trump by name, but the Senator said : "In the four decades I have attended this conference, I cannot recall a year where its purpose was more necessary or more important. This panel is going to ask 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 was a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now." While making his case, McCain, a Republican, mentioned Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, the founder of the Munich Security Conference who was part of the group that plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, asking : "What would von Kleist's generation say if they saw our world today? I fear that much about it would be all too familiar for them. And they would be alarmed by it." McCain then set out to dismantle Trump's 'America First' foreign policy, citing his recent immigration executive order that critics called a Moslem ban, and some of the alleged untruths that have emerged from Trump's White House. McCain said von Kleist: "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 Moslems. 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." Senator McCain closed this segment of his speech by saying he's worried people of the world are abandoning the West : "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. They see it as a bad deal that we may be better off without." He warned the audience in Munich that the US should not be counted out : "Make no mistake my friends, these are dangerous times. You should not count America out. And we should not count each other out." • When we read McCain's remarks, it is hard not to think they were written by Barack Obama and not a senior Senate Republican. • • • McCAIN - TRUMP ANIMOSITY. McCain and Trump have sparred since Trump announced in 2015 he was running for President. The two have traded punches in the media often, with Trump once questioning McCain's status as a war hero. "He's not a war hero," Trump said in July 2015. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured." McCain was a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War and was shot down, which resulted in him spending more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison, where he was repeatedly tortured. McCain served in the House from 1983-1987 and has been in the Senate ever since. • This is not the only recent effort by Senator McCain to belittle or embarrass President Trump. After the recent widely reported Trump phone call with the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that was called disastrous by the mainstream media because Trump reportedly "hung up" on the PM, which the Australian later said was not true, John McCain took it upon himself to call the Australian Ambassador to the United States Joe Hockey to show support for the long alliance between Australia and America. McCain told the MSM : "I called Australia's Ambassador to the United States this morning to express my unwavering support for the US-Australia alliance." McCain also said he asked Hockey to "convey" to Australians that Americans value the alliance : "[We] honor the sacrifice of the Australians who have served and are serving by our side, and remain committed to the safer, freer, and better world that Australia does far more than its fair share to protect and promote." • On Sunday, one day after McCain took a stab at the Republican President when he told members of the European political elite gathered at the Munich Security Conference that the Trump administration “is in disarray,“ he added fuel to the fire by telling NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that dictatorships begin by suppressing freedom of the press. The topic of discussion was, Trump’s tweet from Saturday night, in which he said : “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” Todd responded : “I would hope that our leaders would never believe that any American desires to make another American an enemy. Let’s dial it back.” It appears that by “dialing it back” Todd didn’t mean he would stop talking about the ongoing feud between the President and the media, because he addressed it with Senator McCain on Sunday. McCain, the 2008 losing GOP presidential candidate plowed into Trump again when Todd pressed him : "I was talking about the period as, you know, of the new world order. A fundamental part of that new world order was a free press. I hate the press. I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital. If you want to preserve -- I’m very serious now -- if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started." Todd repsonded : "That’s how dictators get started, with tweets like that?" McCain said : "No. They get started by suppressing free press. In other words, a consolidation of power when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history." • What is most surprising about Senator McCain's drumbeat of criticism for President Ruump is that McCain has voted with the President 94% of the time. • Another surprising aspect of this feud is that President Trump has never tried to suppress the media. He has asked them to stop disseminating "fake news." At his Thursday news conference, Trump explicitly said that he can take bad stories about himself because he is used to them, but he will not accept "fake" news. And, rereading McCain's coments to Chuck Todd, it seems he agrees with Trump. So, what is McCain trying to do?? It is no secret that McCain is despised by the vast majority of Republicans, who blame his lackluster 2008 campaign for giving the presidency to Barack Obama. McCain also represents for Trump's GOP grassroots majority the Washington insider elites who have given lip service to Trump while suspected of working behind the scenes to defeat and destroy him. If there is indeed a 'shadow government' behind the 'soft coup' attempt to alleged to exist to try to oust Trump, then McCain is not far from it, Trump GOPers believe. And, in the escalating tension between Trump and the media, the majority of Americans support Trump. • • • THE McCAIN ROLE IN THE FAKE RUSSIAN 'BLACKMAIL' FILE. By far, the most serious effort by Senator McCain to discredit President Trump came even before Trump was sworn in. In January, details of classified documents allegedly presented to President-Elect Trump emerged in a report by CNN - including memos given to the FBI claiming that the Russian secret services had a file on Trump of 'kompromat' - damaging material the Kremlin could use to blackmail him. The file included claims he ordered prostitutes to commit degrading sex acts in the Presidential suite of a Moscow hotel because the Obamas stayed there. The file was reportedly drawn up by an ex-British spy once stationed in Moscow, but its contents could not be verified and included errors, according to Buzzfeed, which published the file anyway. And how did the fake file become a public document??? John McCain was given a copy months before the election, which he handed to FBI Director James Comey. The FBI sat on the damaging allegations until January when Trump was informed of the file's existence at the end of an intelligence briefing on alleged Russian hacking during the presidential campaign of Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign leaders computers. The senior intel leaders in the Obama administration who briefed Trump -- including James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers -- had also told Obama about the file the day before Trump's briefing. Trump called the claims "fake" and "a political witchhunt." The Kremlin denied as "completely fake" claims that it has a blackmail file on Trump. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissed the reports as a "complete fabrication and utter nonsense." • As it turned out, the file had been offered to most major media outlets in the US last summer, but the file was turned down by them because its contents could not be verified. • Despite the file's details being unverified, the New York Times reported on it, saying that intelligence officials considered the material 'so potentially explosive' that they decided they needed to tell Trump, Obama, and top congressional leaders about it. The NYT described the memos as being "generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump's candidacy." CNN's story was reported by four reporters, including former Watergate scribe Carl Bernstein. Bernstein said on air on CNN that the raw intelligence memos were drafted by a retired MI6 British intelligence operative. MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, conducts foreign intelligence gathering for the UK government. Bernstein described the chain of information in detail : The dossier was drawn up by an unnamed British ex-spy, obtained by a British diplomat and passed personally to John McCain - who then gave it to James Comey, the FBI Director. • • • JOHN McCAIN AND THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA. The anger of the Washington elites of both parties is that Donald Trump won the presidency using a populist appeal directly to voters that was so effective that he was able singlehandedly in one election to redraw the electoral map. For the GOP insiders in Congress, the irony is that Trump made the GOP competitive where it had floundered for decades in presidential elections because they were playing ball with Progressive Democrats in order to keep their jobs as Senators and Representatives. President Trump is a direct threat to their long-standing control of the GOP's post-Reagan losing agenda of free trade, minimal limits on immigration and aggressive foreign interventionism. Thy believeTrump must be reined in and controlled because his success threatens to blow up the whole Progressive-conservative agenda and label it 'fake' because it is fake. The GOP policy orthodoxy that underpins their power was a sham developed to save their positions and benefits, even though it destroyed any real opposition to the Progressive Democrat agenda, especially under Barack Obama, and made the GOP an irrelevance in Washington. • The aim of Progressivism is always the seizure of absolute and permanent power in order to carry out social transformation. Progressives view the election of Donald Trump as an anomaly and danger because he stands in the way of what they think is their 'rightful control' of the political system. So, it is no wonder they've responded with violence and obstructionism. When the Senate minority leader vows to block nearly every Trump appointee, sight unseen, we know we have entered a new level of political division. • The federal government as it now exists would have been unimaginable to the Founders, who envisioned a small executive under the personal administration of the President working alongside and constrained by a Congress and judicial branch, each of these constrained by the Constitution. Today's federal monster is precisely what Washington and Jefferson warned of. Obama's executive actions, as bad as they were, were just the beginning -- testing the waters for a full-scale assault on the American Republic. The end goal for Progressives is not a nonviolent democratic welfare state. It is a vast statist bureaucracy through which the all-powerful elite turn its vast powers against the people and govern all aspects of life. • Donald Trump's victory is evidence of how deeply entrenched this agenda has become for Progressives. They simply do not care about America as a uniquely constitutional Republic; they care about usurping her power. These are the two great factions at war in America today. Donald Trump represents the constitutional Republic. Barack Obama represents the Progressive absolutist all-powerful State. • • • DEAR READERS, how does John McCain fit into this political war of the worlds? We have only questions without answers. Does he hate Trump because Trump damaged his ego? Does he fear Trump because he sees his power slipping away as Trump takes charge of the GOP? Does he need to damage Trump so that in 2020 his elite insider wing of the GOP can retake power, even if it loses the presidency? Has he sold out to Barack Obama, serving as his GOP 'voice of reason' by attacking Trump? Does he actually believe that an America sold to the Progressives -- so that they can trash the Constitution and deliver statist control over every aspect of individual and community American life -- is really the best road ahead? Is he an opportunist Progressive in Republican clothing? • Or, is Senator John McCain simply an 80-year-old man whose faculties are fading so badly that he has forgotten what America stands for and why he served so bravely in Vietnam? That is a question for the citizens of Arizona, the Republican Party and the US Senate to answer.