Sen. John McCain wants the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold an “open session” today as it debates adding DADT to the Defense Department bill. He’s getting his way. And while some may claim it’s just going to be an opportunity for McCain to rail against the gays, we’re completely open to any opportunity at transparency where the senator can continue writing his own history as an ornery old fool.
We all know where McCain stands on the policy: he wants to keep it. He’s consistently contradicted his own arguments about the repeal effort. And his grandstanding these days appears more like a way to convince Arizona voters he’ll continue voting for hatred than anything else.
So expect nothing new with McCain’s stab at letting everyone see how the Armed Services Committee is going to bat this one around. At this point we’re just interested in how many pullquotes McCain can deliver that’ll be written into his biographies that paint this man as a prejudiced, misinformed stain.
Cam
I say, let the bigots get time on air. Let the rest of the country see them. Remember, what killed the Macarthy Hearings was television. As far as I’m concerned, let McCain go and rail against this to the heavens. Hell, the tea partiers hate him so much, they might become gay rights supporters just to piss him off.
Oh, and by the way, McCain, how does your openly gay cheif of staff and campaign manager Mark Buse feel about this?
Lanjier
I think McCain should have another closed session — put him back in the bamboo cages of Vietnam where he can re-learn that treating veterans badly is a disgrace.
Cam
Remember, The More that McCain is on TV the stupider he looks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c
The Artist
Isn’t there a nice beach or retirement home this man can occupy? I recommend the Virgin Islands! PEACELUVNBWILD! sign The New Power Generation.
mdthom
@The Artist: Send him back to Panama where he was born
Freddie
He’s so mavericky-ish.
B
As usual, QUEERTY spun it inaccurately to fit some agenda that has little to do with what is actually going on. According to the link QUEERTY provided ( http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/05/27/mccain-dadt-sasc/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter ): “While some may interpret this as a ‘nod to transparency’, I expect McCain will use the time to grand stand on the issue and burnish his conservative credentials in light of his tough re-election race against J.D. Hayworth.”
This is a good guess as to what is really going on: it is not so much that McCain is personally homophobic, but rather that he has no problem bashing gays (verbally) to help get himself reelected, and he won’t let any personal belief on the subject interfere with how he has to position himself in a race against someone more conservative than he is.
AxelDC
Get off my lawn!
Bill Perdue
Bad news. ‘B’ is back, persistently lying about the nature and role of homophobia, saying anything he can dream up to defend rancid bigots like McCain.
Todays big lie, No 3485 in a series by ‘B’, claims that McCain is not a ‘personal’ bigot.
It doesn’t matter what McCains personal opinions are, or even if he has any. His ‘opinions’ are based on polling that tells him what bigots want and he bases his politics on that.
McCains opposition to same sex marriage, ENDA, and repeal of Democrat Bill Clintons DADT and DOMA make him a functional bigot. A bigot in real life politics. That’s all that matters. The same is true of George Bush. And of B. Clinton for championing and signing DADT and DOMA and boasting about signing DOMA in election ads on redneck radio.
‘B’ is a right wing talking head for the politics of the DNC, the HRC, and groups like EQCA. And now McCain. He subsumes our (not his) fight for equality to the hypocrisy and fraud of electoral politics.
‘B’ relentlessly lies and misinforms to promote his anti-GLBT, take it slow approach to the fight for equality. Then he accuses his myriad detractors of lying about hin and being out to get him.
The second part is true. He’s heartily despised by honest activists.
Lookyloo
Yes, televise it, record it, disseminate it. Make it readily available for all of history to see how purposefully ignorant and hateful some of these people are. They will be remembered as frantic bigots for generations to come. Ha!
Sine
I honestly hate McCain, but I’ll take him over Hayworth any day of the week.
Cam
@B:
B you were the one defending George Rekers in the other post and trying to say that the Jounralists there set him up etc…
Well with McCain your point is irrelevent. It doesn’t matter if he is as homophobic as he looks, or if he is just doing it to compare to an oponent. If he prevents a repeal of DADT his reasoning for doing so doesn’t matter.
Also, if he isn’t really as homophobic as he sounds and is only doing it because of the election, then he has zero integrity. He would sell out the civil rights of people just to keep the cushy job that he is unqualified for.
Queer Supremacist
@Lanjier:
Amen. John McBreeder got what he deserved in Vietnam, and if there was any justice he would have gotten worse.
Bill Perdue
John McCain was shot down during the US terror boming attacks that killed many Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnamese military rescued him and US other pilots, many of them in danger of being lynched by enreaged civilians. After capture McCain was totured with sleep deprivation, withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. He wasn’t water boarded and sexualy humiliated.
According to Andrew Sullivan those were the same torture techniques he voted for in the Military Commissions Act. Sullivan says “And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.”
McCain is a pig who deserves no sympathy from honest LGBT activists.
[img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DQ1x-wlbt9E/SMCeCZIBShI/AAAAAAAAAB4/iGA-Y66z2d0/s400/mccain_protester2.jpg[/img]
Don’t be a damn fool. Don’t enlist. Don’t fight. Don’t translate.
B
No. 9 · Bill Perdue lied again by saying, “Bad news. ‘B’ is back, persistently lying about the nature and role of homophobia, saying anything he can dream up to defend rancid bigots like McCain. ”
Someone would really have to be a moron to think that a comment to the effect that McCain is an unprincipled opportunist is somehow defending McCain.
No. 12 · Cam misstated the facts by writing, “@B: B you were the one defending George Rekers in the other post and trying to say that the Jounralists there set him up etc…”
Not true at all. Others explicitly stated that he was set up (I may have quoted someone else’s response before commenting on it), but I mostly pointed out flaws in various arguments. I presume someone must have targeted Rekers in some sense, or that someone could have set him up, given how unlikely it is that the journalists, Rekers, and the rentboy would be at the same place at the same time (Rekers’ travel plans were not public information) and as it turns out, that’s what did happen – the person who spilled the beans behaved abominably, violating the privacy of the rentboy by using a password entrusted to him for his own personal reasons. The other thing I pointed out was that you could in fact find and access rentboy.com contact pages without first visting rentboy.com’s home page – search engines can get at that information either directly or because a third party provided a link. So, it is possible that Rekers followed some links from some other web site or a search result and landed on the rentboy’s contact page, although it would require a coincidence.
Bill Perdue
Can ‘B’ ever stop lying, and then crying when he’s called on it?
Stay tuned to the next episode of As the Stomach Turns.