Donald Trump — as is his wont — used quite hard and direct language to begin a renovation project that is long overdue, a dramatically corrected assessment of Senator John McCain (R-Arizona). I have no objection to describing and respecting McCain as a “hero” for his long and painful internment in a North Vietnamese prison. He was shot down, wounded, suffered, persevered, and lived to get home. But since returning home he has exploited, for his personal benefit and to his country’s cost, his status as a former POW more shamelessly and ruthlessly than any other POW I can recall. McCain has dined out on his imprisonment for decades, and has used the protection afforded by the citizenry’s respect for his military service to do nothing but harm to the nation that has revered him.

• As an Arizona senator, McCain has abetted the flood of illegal Mexican immigrants that has inundated the state and the rest of the southwest, and that has ravaged the region’s economy, social services, education systems, and massively changed its demographic stability and social cohesion in a way that has been resolutely opposed by local residents and their elected local and state officials. In his actions, McCain has made unmistakably clear his arrogant disdain for his constituents’ opinions and desires; his utter unconcern for the economic, social, human, and crime-growth costs brought by the plague of illegal immigration he has condoned; and his treasonable willingness to sap the strength of the American Union for his own political benefit.
• As an Arizona senator and purported expert on U.S. national security, McCain has been in found in the vanguard of support for every war the national government has gotten the nation into since he has been in office. With his bipartisan colleagues, McCain’s specialty has been to support the start of all of these necessary and unnecessary wars to the hilt, while never intending to win them, thereby letting many thousands of America’s soldier-children get killed, wounded, or crippled for nothing, imposing back-breaking debt on all Americans, and earning the country ever more hatred around the world for intervening in affairs that are none of America’s business. Ironically, in fact, McCain for decades has imposed on other U.S. military personnel and their families exactly the same kind of savage treatment that the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon ruthlessly imposed on him and his generation of patriotic young Americans by never intending to win the Vietnamese War they started.
• As an Arizona senator, McCain has shown that while he may have read the U.S. Constitution and defended it during his military services, he neither understands it nor respects the application of its provisions. From pro-peace advocates to those arguing that illegal immigration is ruining America, Arizona’s senior senator has refused to listen and described the citizens involved as “crazies” or worse. The lesson McCain teaches is that the 1st Amendment is for those citizens who agree with and provide campaign contributions to their betters in the national government, but all other Americans must be silent and do as their told while the national government’s domestic and foreign policies shreds their society and marches America to hell.

As an Arizona senator and a Republican presidential candidate, McCain behaved in a cowardly manner and refused to destroy what should have been the most easily defeated Democratic presidential candidate since the admirable, courageous, but misguided George McGovern — a man who flew 35 combat missions over Europe in World War II and never boasted of them. Because Barack Obama is Black, McCain refused to focus the debates on his appalling lack of any kind of work experience, his drug use, his racism disguised by the title “community organizer,” and the hatred for America he had so clearly shown by being a 20-year congregant of a racist Black pastor who denounced white Americans, virulently hated the United States, and preached its destruction. Again ironically, McCain’s gutless and simpering performance during the 2008 presidential campaign helped to put most Americans in an Obama-made prison that is as lawless and economically and spiritually painful as McCain’s North Vietnamese prison was lawless and physically and psychologically painful.

So choose your words a bit more carefully, Mr. Trump, but otherwise pour it on. You have torn the curtain aside from Senator McCain and shed light on the truth. Now move on to his accomplices in the domestic and foreign policies that are destroying America; namely, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and all the other presidential candidates in both parties, save for Walker, Paul, Webb, Carson — and a guy named Trump.