U.S. Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sits with U.S. Senator Jack Reed, the panel’s Ranking Member, on July 29, 2015. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
The other day, the Times featured columns by Senator John McCain and their regular op-ed writer Thomas Friedman that might have found readers yearning for the sonorous liberal bromides in which the editorial page typically specializes.
The views expressed by McCain and Friedman are alike in one respect only: They are bizarre.
McCain’s purpose is to urge the administration to persist in the enterprise formerly known as the Global War on Terrorism. From the outset of that enterprise, back when today’s new recruits were still toddling around wearing Huggies, McCain was zealously promoting it.
Now desperate, Friedman summons Mattis as “the last man standing—the only one who has not been infected by Trump’s metastasizing ethical cancer.
“Secretary Mattis,” Friedman writes, “we don’t need any more diagnosis of the problem. We need action.” The necessary action is this: Along with Kelly and McMaster, Mattis should tell Trump “that if he does not change his ways you will all quit, en masse.”
Friedman insists that he is “not talking about a coup.” This, too, is sheer, indeed contemptible, dishonesty. He is, in fact, not only “talking about” a coup but using the nation’s newspaper of record to advocate a coup
What does it say about the state of public discourse that views such as these appear in what is ostensibly the nation’s most influential publication? You decide. But I think it says that the crisis facing our country is much bigger than Trump.
Read more here.
