Photo Source Mason Votes | CC BY 2.0
After a week of media fawning, flags racing up and down staffs, and memorials coast-to-coast, John McCain will finally be laid to rest this weekend in Annapolis amid eulogies from George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Give McCain some credit for using the occasion of his funeral to illustrate vividly that there’s less than a dime’s worth of difference between the politicians of our time. I’m only surprised that McCain’s final will and testament didn’t follow the Caesarian tradition and call for seven days of war games as part of his memorial. (The best protest Trump could make against this prolonged McCaingasm is not to drone anyone this week.) The image of McCain as some kind of free-wheeling political contrarian was, of course, almost entirely the creation of the press corps that is now weeping over his corpse. McCain was no Cicero. His jokes, barbs and long-winded floor speeches were largely for show. When it came time for voting (on matters ranging from war in Iraq to apartheid in South Africa), McCain was an unvarnished creature of the far right. Politically he wasn’t far removed from the political savages of our time: Jesse Helms, Trent Lott and Dick Armey. Those spitting cobras have been rightly consigned to a kind of historical detention for their racism and warmongering, but McCain has been almost universally venerated, largely because he knew that the easiest way to manipulate the press was to preen for…