As soon as John McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer, a bipartisan chorus of praise for the career politician emerged.
Whether McCain is the good man and good “public servant” that he is now being made out to be are empirical questions. The evidence with respect to both is overwhelmingly in the negative.
Since a disastrous public servant is and must be a person with bad character, i.e. not a good person, we needn’t even look at McCain’s private life in order to see that he is neither a good man nor a good public servant.
Let’s take his foreign policy “achievements” alone.
No one, including McCain himself, denies that he is a war “hawk.” Indeed, as can be gotten readily enough by sites like Geopolitics Alert, one would be hard pressed to find an American military conflict or potential conflict on behalf of which McCain did not advocate vigorously. Whether it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya or Iran; Nigeria, Sudan, or Mali; Bosnia, Kosovo, or Ukraine; Russia, North Korea, and possibly even China—McCain’s has been the loudest and among the most influential of voices calling for military action.
It is not an exaggeration to say that had McCain’s foreign policy not prevailed, literally hundreds of thousands and possibly more human beings around the globe would have been spared the incalculable suffering that they in fact were made to endure. A substantial number of these people would not have lost their lives.
In Iraq alone, at least 200,000 or so Iraqis, the majority of whom were noncombatant civilians, were killed. Some estimates place the number of Iraqis killed at one million. Doctors and teachers were either murdered by insurgents and criminals or forced to flee. The majority of children…