John McCain
PEOPLE | 1944 - 2018
The Political Elevation and Contested Legacy of John McCain
The death of Senator John McCain in August 2018 marked a significant moment that revealed important truths regarding the nature of the American establishment media and the mechanisms of political power. His passing at the age of 84 was long anticipated, affording media outlets ample time to prepare extensive commemorative tributes.
The resulting coverage was voluminous, with the national newspaper of record allocating more than three full pages to his primary obituary, an enormous wealth of coverage exceeding that afforded to most former American presidents. The tone of this media coverage, across both liberal and conservative mainstream outlets, was exceptionally laudatory, with scarcely a negative assessment permitted outside the political fringe.
This overwhelming, undiluted political affection for McCain was conspicuously odd to observers familiar with his activities.
Despite major media outlets claiming to be vehemently critical of the disastrous Iraq War and the possibility of an attack upon Iran, McCain was universally established as the leading figure in America’s War Party, eagerly supporting all military endeavours with furious enthusiasm.
His chant, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran, became the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign.
This discrepancy suggests that the true positions of major media outlets on central political issues may not align with their perceived roles, perhaps merely constituting elements of a performance intended to deceive naive readers.
The Compromised Record of Military Service
A crucial element of McCain’s celebrated political ascent was his status as a former Prisoner of War (POW) in Vietnam. However, the media surrounding his death largely airbrushed discordant facts, including very serious accusations regarding his personal war record and his subsequent role in a major government cover-up.
The POW Cover-Up and Betrayal
McCain was established as the central figure in the official cover-up of a monstrous betrayal: The Vietnam Prisoner of War Cover-Up - a deliberate abandonment of hundreds of American POWs in Vietnam. Subsequent investigations provided a mountain of evidence regarding this calculated abandonment.
McCain utilised his national reputation as the best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, thereby allowing America’s political establishment to evade serious embarrassment.
This cover-up was not without precedent in his family history. The Senator’s own father, Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., led the similar cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen. McCain’s participation in the abandonment cover-up earned him the lush rewards dispensed by the generous ruling elites.
Wartime Collaboration and Fiction
The serious accusations concerning McCain’s personal Vietnam War record were deliberately concealed by a blanket of media silence. His widely disseminated stories of his torture as a POW were likely fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors.
Indeed, at the time of the conflict, American media had reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of the North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were subsequently suppressed.
It is probable that his father, ranking as one of America’s top military officers, personally intervened politically to ensure that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from that of a traitor to a war-hero, thus paving the way for the younger McCain to embark upon his political career.
Personal Conduct and Entanglements
McCain’s background included profoundly tarnished personal incidents and highly suspicious financial associations that were generally ignored by the national press corps but were casually hidden within reports or uncovered by alternative investigations.
Domestic Violence and Physical Assault
McCain’s private life was associated with physical violence against his wife, Cindy. Interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that, around the time he was embroiled in the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence.
This same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Subsequent highly suspicious marital incidents included the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by political journalists as being due to excessive hand-shaking. The vast resources of the entire national press corps exhibited an uncanny disinterest in investigating these credible reports of physical abuse.
Links to Organised Crime
McCain first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, soon after moving to the state, with his campaign financed by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune. This inheritance elevated the McCain household to one of the wealthiest in the Senate.
The Phoenix beer-monopoly, valued at approximately $200 million in late 2008, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner, Kemper Marley, was deeply linked to organised crime. Close associates of Marley had been convicted of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden, triumphal entrance into Arizona politics.
Such facts, which connected McCain’s personal fortune one or two steps removed from the car-bomb assassins of an inquisitive journalist investigating mobsters, remained hidden by the national press corps.
The Mechanism of Political Control and Blackmail
The astonishing fact that a politician with a record so deeply tarnished in so many ways could reach such a pinnacle of American political power suggests a sinister reality: McCain’s elevation was not achieved in spite of the devastating facts littering his past, but precisely because of them.
The Political Puppet and Compromise
In contemporary America, the system often elevates attractive front-men who are selected for their popular appeal and political malleability, functioning merely as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings. An obvious strategy for mitigating the risk that a puppet ruler will attempt to cut their strings is to select individuals who are so deeply compromised that their political survival is entirely controlled by the powerful figures who promote them.
The record of his politically convenient military cover-up, his association with domestic violence, and his financial proximity to organised crime provided hard evidence that could be used for blackmail. In the realm of physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, the existence of some unknown force is assumed. McCain’s career trajectory, marked by these inexplicable deviations, suggests the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of the regular political world, namely, the leverage provided by blackmail.
History offers precedents for this mechanism, where secret evidence of personal failings—such as sexual encounters or illicit behaviour—played a crucial role in determining political outcomes and the ascent of major figures to the highest offices.
The effectiveness of Blackmail material varies tremendously across eras and regions, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. The long record of major media cover-ups surrounding stories of sexual or criminal misbehaviour suggests a willingness to enlist in a conspiracy of silence to protect powerful individuals vulnerable to such leverage.
The remarkably ferocious wave of censorship and attacks against anyone broaching controversial subjects, particularly near the time of his death, strongly suggests that certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling the late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his passing.