Tag Archives: John McCain

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Vets health reform stalled by … yep, politics

If you’ll recall when the veterans health care scandal rocked the nation, you’ll also recall high-minded statements by politicians proclaiming veterans’ health care to be their top priority.

By golly, they wouldn’t let politics stand in the way of improving the delivery of health care to veterans.

Fast forward to today. Politics is standing in the way. This is outrageous in the extreme.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/213222-talks-on-veterans-bill-in-full-meltdown

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has co-authored a bill along with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would enable veterans to get non-VA health care if the nearest Veterans Administration health facility is more than 40 miles away.

It’s hit a roadblock. Where? In the House of Representatives, where penny-pinching Republicans control the place. They are bickering with Democrats over how to pay for this bill.

There now seems a realistic chance that Congress is going to adjourn for its lengthy summer recess without approving this needed reform.

The veterans health care scandal rocked the nation to its core. Remember that? Remember when we got all twisted up over news of veterans dying in Phoenix, Ariz., because the agency couldn’t deliver health services in a timely fashion? How about the news that the VA was cooking patient logs to cover the backsides of administrators? Didn’t that news send pols and pundits and orbit?

Those lofty declarations of wanting to improve health delivery to vets have given way to the usual partisan bickering, backstabbing and bloviating.

Sanders wants to negotiate a deal with the House. House leaders are critical of Senate Democrats for boycotting meetings to discuss possible changes.

Congress’s approval ratings are low enough as it is. The politicians who serve in both congressional chambers know the consequence of those poll numbers. They could cost them their jobs this fall. And for what? Because they cannot settle on legislation that four months ago everyone said had to get done … no matter what.

Get it done, ladies and gentlemen of Capitol Hill.

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Thornberry to hit talk-show circuit?

I cannot help but wonder about the exposure U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry of little ol’ Clarendon, Texas is going to get now that he’s positioned to become the next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

This is a major committee assignment. It involves funding for our troops, the men and women who defend us against bad guys. It involves deciding which weapons to finance and what levels of related financial support Americans will pay.

Thornberry is going to lead a critically important committee when the next Congress convenes — assuming, of course, he’s re-elected this fall. He’ll win re-election. Bet on it.

For almost all of Thornberry’s nearly two decades in Congress, he’s been a proverbial “back bencher.” He doesn’t make much news. He doesn’t hog the spotlight the way, say, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Peter King and Chuck Schumer do.

That might change now that Thornberry prepares to take the gavel from retiring Chairman Buck McKeon.

Those Sunday news talk show hosts are going to want to know the particulars of what the Armed Services Committee is planning for the next Congress. The military has been in the news, as President Obama has announced plans to end our combat role in Afghanistan. There’ll be plenty of discussion of redeploying our military assets. There’ll be talk about a probable reduced military footprint abroad.

These topics will be right in the wheelhouse of the Armed Services Committee chairman. That means you, Rep. Thornberry.

The veteran Republican lawmaker has been sitting on the back bench long enough. It’s time to step up, tell us what you think and where you intend to lead this critical congressional panel.

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Health always an issue for national candidates

Rich Lowry is a smart young man.

His essay, published on Politico.com, states clearly an obvious truth about the upcoming presidential campaign. It is that Hillary Clinton’s health will be an issue.

I get that. Indeed, Americans always should have assurances that the commander in chief will be in tip-top shape when he or she takes the reins of government.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/rove-is-right-106694.html?hp=l3#.U3QprFJOWt8

Lowry, smart conservative that he is, defends fellow Republican Karl Rove’s assertion that Clinton might have serious “brain injury” stemming from a fall she suffered in 2012. That’s where I part company with Lowry.

To his fundamental point about the health of candidates, let’s flash back a few election cycles.

Wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s health an issue when he ran for election the first time in 1980? He was nearly 70. When he ran for re-election in 1984, he stumbled badly in his first debate with Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, fueling open discussion that he had “lost it.” President Reagan quelled that talk immediately at the next debate when he said he “would not make my opponent’s age an issue by exploiting his youth and inexperience.”

Sen. John McCain faced similar questions about his health when he ran against Sen. Barack Obama in 2008. Let’s remember that there was some ghastly whispering going on about whether he suffered too much emotional trauma as a Vietnam War prisoner for more than five years. Plus, he had been treated for cancer. His health became an issue.

Hillary Clinton will be roughly the same age as Reagan and McCain when they ran for president. Let’s keep these health issues in their proper perspective. Igniting mean-spirited gossip about potential “brain injury” isn’t the way to examine an important issue.

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HRC sick of the media? Duh!

Sometime around late 1999, I offered a prediction.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would not run for the U.S. Senate in New York, I said then. Why? Well, my notion was that she had grown weary of the constant battering she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had taken from the right-wing media, not to mention the members of the Senate who voted to convict her husband of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

She ran anyway — and won handily — in 2000.

The columnist Roger Simon, one of D.C.’s smarter political analysts, writes that Clinton is sick of the media.

Will that prevent her from running for president of the United States in 2016? Part of me says “yes,” but I now know better than to suggest that HRC doesn’t have the stomach for another campaign.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/hillary-clinton-media-simon-says-104497.html?hp=l18

I cannot quite figure Clinton out. Her husband cheated on her with a White House intern less than half his age. She forgave him — apparently. The House of Representatives impeached the president for lying to a federal grand jury about the affair. The Senate then put the president on trial, but acquitted him on all three counts relating to obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power.

The then-first lady decided she wanted to serve with those individuals in the Senate after she and her husband vacated the White House. By all accounts, she became a stellar senator from New York and earned the respect of her colleagues. Interestingly, one of her best friends in the Senate happens to be John McCain, R-Ariz., who was among those senators who voted to convict the president. Go figure.

The media beat her up as she ran for president in 2008. Her campaign ended just before the convention that year and then — wouldn’t you know it? — she ended up serving as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

The media kept dogging her. She had at least one major misfire, her handling of the Benghazi consulate tragedy. Again, the media poured it on.

Now, at least one leading Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — a possible presidential candidate himself in ’16 — is dredging up the Lewinsky matter as a way to besmirch Hillary’s reputation. Give me a break.

Still, the media keep digging into all this stuff.

Why should Hillary Clinton want any part of this?

Beats me. I remain baffled that she ran for the Senate in the first place.

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Cruz needs a visit to the ‘woodshed’

OK, I have to make one more point about Sen. Ted Cruz’s latest rant involving his Republican Party elders.

He’s disrespecting two of them in a big way.

Cruz took it upon himself to suggest that Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Bob Dole didn’t stand for “principles” when they ran unsuccessfully as the GOP nominees for president in 2008 and 1996, respectively.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-08/cruz-draws-bob-dole-rebuke-over-stand-for-principle-comments.html

What’s so very troubling about this whipper-snapper’s comments is that he has called out two of more distinguished war heroes ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Cruz, let me add, never served his country’s military.

Dole shot back immediately at Cruz. “Senator Cruz needs to check the record before passing judgment,” the 90-year-old Dole said in a statement. “I was one of President Reagan’s strongest supporters, and my record is that of a traditional Republican conservative.” Ah yes, “traditional conservative.” That’s how Dole describes himself. He’s the kind of conservative who’s fallen out of favor with the current corps of firebrands who are mounting a takeover of a once-great political party. Cruz is the non-traditional conservative, to be sure. Indeed, he’s becoming the non-traditional senator, a Lone Ranger.

For the record, Dole suffered grievous wounds fighting the Nazis near the end of World War II. He lost the use of his right arm and was nearly killed on an Italian battlefield in April 1945.

And Sen. McCain? He was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and spent more than five years being tortured as a prisoner of war by his communist captors. He, too, suffered terrible wounds when his plane was shot down over Hanoi and he parachuted into a lake in the middle of the city.

These men need no lecture about honor or principle — particularly from a loudmouth such as Ted Cruz.

That’s all I’m going to say about that.

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Texas’s Cruz missile misfires once again

You have to love that Ted Cruz.

He gets elected to the U.S. Senate and immediately makes a name for himself — while embarrassing many of the people he purports to represent.

The Texas Republican did it again today, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he denigrated the likes of Sens. Bob Dole and John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — all of whom ran for president but lost to Democratic opponents.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cpac/mccain-dole-scorch-cruz-cpac-comments-n47126

It was Cruz’s criticism of Dole that drew the most intense response from McCain.

“All of us remember President Dole, and President McCain and President Romney,” Cruz told the CPAC crowd. “Those are good men, they’re all decent men but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle Democrats celebrate.”

McCain has demanded that Cruz apologize to Sen. Dole, the 1996 GOP presidential nominee.

“He can say what he wants to about me, he can say anything he wants to about Mitt. Mitt can take it,” McCain said. “But when he throws Bob Dole in there, I wonder if he thinks that Bob Dole stood for principle on a hilltop in Italy when he was so gravely wounded and left part of his body there fighting for our country.”

Ouch!

Dole responded as well, noting that he was a strong supporter of President Ronald Reagan’s agenda and declared his voting record is as conservative as it gets. Dole also worked well with Democrats, including leading liberals such as the late Sen. George McGovern — another World War II hero with whom he had a lasting friendship.

This still-new senator has some work to do to understand that he needs to respect his elders. He just might need them in his corner if he intends to run for president himself in 2016.

I’m betting he is going to be marching to his own cadence.

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Hey, didn’t Russia invade Georgia … in 2008?

The criticism of President Obama’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine crisis of 2014 ignores the Russia-Georgia crisis of 2008.

Six years ago, Russian dictator/president Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, another one of those former Soviet satellite states. The U.S. president at the time, George W. Bush, let it happen. What could President Bush to stop Putin? Nothing. What should he have done? Go to war? That’s a tough call, given that the United States was already involved in two shooting wars at the time, Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m left to wonder: Where was the criticism from the right back then? It was silent.

Move forward to the present day. Russian troops are sitting in Crimea, a region of Ukraine. There might be more military involvement from Russia, which is nervous over the ouster of pro-Russia president by insurgents in Ukraine.

What’s President Obama supposed to do? What can he do? Does he go to war with Russia? Well, of course not.

Yet the criticism is pouring in from the right, from the likes of Sen. John McCain, former defense boss Donald Rumsfeld, former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, every right-wing talking head this side of Sean Hannity. They’re all bemoaning the “invasion” of Russian troops of a sovereign country, Ukraine.

Oh, but wait. Didn’t this country invade a sovereign country, Iraq, in March 2003 because — we were told — the late dictator Saddam Hussein had this big cache of chemical weapons?

President Bush told us once that he peered into Putin’s “soul” and saw a man of commitment and integrity. Well, that soul also belongs to a former head of the KGB, the former Soviet spy agency.

I’m thinking another key Republican, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has it right. He’s telling his fellow GOPers to tone down the criticism while the president tries — along with our allies — to manage a dangerous crisis.

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Ready for court fight, Mr. President?

The overheated and inflated response of congressional Republicans to President Obama’s vow to use executive authority to move issues forward would make you think the president is imposing some brand of imperial law on the country.

It’s not happening.

See you in court, says GOP

The sound had barely been turned off in the House of Representatives chamber after Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night before we heard GOP lawmakers proclaiming the president was overstepping his constitutional authority, was trying to crown himself King Barack the First or seeking to render Congress totally irrelevant.

Give … me … a … bleeping … break.

Barack Obama’s use of executive orders is but a fraction of its use by many of his predecessors. He’s acted in such a manner less frequently than President George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, two heroes of the GOP right/far-right wing.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., believes Obama is abusing “the intent of the Constitution.” Really? What precisely is that intent, senator? He doesn’t offer specifics, other than to rattle his sword and bluster about taking the Obama administration to court.

Let’s quit hyperventilating here. President Obama’s legal team is fully aware of the constraints placed on him by the Constitution. He cannot write law. He cannot raises taxes. He cannot increase the minimum wage for every American — but he can, and did, raise the minimum wage for some Americans, such as federal government contract employees. This is small stuff, ladies and gentlemen of the GOP.

Let’s lose the righteous indignation and take Barack Obama up on another pledge he made at the State of the Union: let’s work together.

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Could this memoir have waited?

John McCain isn’t exactly a friend of Barack Obama. I’ve had this nagging notion that McCain hasn’t gotten over getting drubbed by the then-young senator from Illinois in their 2008 campaign for the presidency.

The Arizona U.S. senator, though, posits an interesting thought about a memoir that is critical of his former campaign adversary. He said today the author of “Duty,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, should have waited until the end of the Afghanistan War to release this tell-all tale.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/12/john-mccain-robert-gates_n_4585156.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037

It is puzzling, some have argued, that a former defense chief — who was asked to stay on when the new commander in chief took charge in 2009 — would be so harshly critical of his former boss at this time in history.

These kinds of memoirs do reverberate around the world. The United States is seeking to wind down its longest-running war, seeking to hand combat operations over to the Afghans who have everything to gain and lose in this struggle.

Does this memoir undercut that effort? Does it place men and women in harm’s way in additional peril at some undefined level?

I’m not sure when it’s ever right to publish a memoir that criticizes the commander in chief while military operations are still on-going.

I do respect John McCain’s view on these matters, given his own extensive and distinguished military career.

Now that the book is out and the full-throated chatter on it has commenced, time will tell if it does any damage in the field.

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‘Shaking hands with Hitler’? C’mon, Sen. McCain

John McCain needs to get a grip on reality.

The Republican U.S. senator from Arizona compared President Obama’s handshake today with Cuban President Raul Castro as akin to “shaking hands with Adolf Hitler.” Good grief.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-mandela-memorial-172822763.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory

The men met for an instant today as Obama was arriving in a section set aside for dignitaries who gathered to pay their respects to the late Nelson Mandela, who was memorialized today in a stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The meeting was unscripted. It was unplanned. It was totally spontaneous. It also was totally in keeping with the spirit of conciliation and forgiveness that speakers today honored as they spoke of Mandela’s greatness.

I also ought to point out that when President Obama spoke today in the pouring rain, he railed against government leaders who proclaim their undying support for what Mandela stood for while denying their own people the right to protest their government’s policies.

Do you think he might have had Raul Castro in mind when he said that?

John McCain has served his country with high honor. He’s paid a huge sacrifice. That shouldn’t give him license to make patently ridiculous statements on the day the president of the United States represented his country in honoring the life and times of Nelson Mandela.