NYRB quoting from a new book about McCain and the press:
Brock and Waldman write:
"And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed forces in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at least the belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical questions. On a 2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon noted that reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or five hundred," to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he served in Vietnam, and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his POW experience is not only the sum total of McCain's "character," but constitutes the lens through which character itself must be viewed in any race in which McCain participates."
So McCain's "character" is axiomatic, even when he says things like this:
"I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." (John McCain, 2000)
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but these words were integral to a project of racialized extermination. Racist epithets such as this made it possible to dehumanize people and justify wholesale abuse, torture and killing like this, and this. Free fire zones and the Phoenix program meant that this kind of killing was not an aberrration, but the norm. The US military killed somewhere between one and two million Vietnamese, both military and civilian, during our part of the war.
The fact that McCain was imprisoned and tortured by Vietnamese forces during this war shouldn't give him a liscense to use the language of racist extermination. I don't want a President who thinks in those terms.
Like this guy isn't scary enough.
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