While AOC was criticized for her twitter post commemorating McCain, I want to dive a bit deeper into their support for the same dishonest strategies in American politics.
Beyond the commemoration after his death:
https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1033538876370046977
John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.
As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy.
He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.
Beyond the fact she's been supported by McCain staffers in the Lincoln project.
https://www.newsweek.com/lincoln-project-co-founder-steve-schmidt-aoc-work-project-1554336
Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, shared a lengthy Twitter thread early Saturday publicly reaching out to Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Both of them weaponized the Bureaucratic "kiss of death" to defend the establishment apparatus, and suppress grassroots activists on the issues, while inflating their own victim status to suppress dissent.
I recently had to run into a very heated, intense argument with an acquantaince who remarked that McCain was "an asshole, but still a war hero", and I had to go off on an angry rant trashing McCain.
At first I appeared like a completely disrespectful asshole (and to be fair, I did mock McCain's POW stay as "getting the queen VIP treatment while selling out, pretended his arm injury was due to torture rather than a plane crash, meanwhile the true hero's got tortured"), but my acquaintance eventually conceded one of the points I made really resonated with him and changed his understanding of McCain, specifically his selling out of stranded POW's.
As we've all seen by "forcethevote", AOC revealed she uses a strategy where only a select few organizations are "credible" to promote some ideas, but those organizations act as the gatekeepers to prevent further progress
AOC claims "actual M4A grassroots organizers" are not pushing for a floor vote on M4A. The Squad commences with mental gymnastics.
Yes, so only a select few groups (which haven't actually done anything on legislation in healthcare, that have 0 timetables for goals, and their agenda is vague/unaccountable) are allowed to speak with authority on the issue, everyone else is a nutcase to be ignored.
And then of course she amplified her gatekeeper position, pivoting herself as the "victim of hateful anti-progressive violence", while pushing to lead the move to fuck them over.
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1345193022179467268
And to be 💯% honest, it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote.
Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone,that’s violence
9:19 PM · Jan 1, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
The absolutely extreme all-or-nothing tunnel vision she enforces is reminiscent to me of John McCain.
The piece of trash "John McCain" helped coordinate something similar when stranded american pows were dying in labor camps after the Vietnam War, where only our own (paid off, much like modern once leadership) org heads were credible, and everything else was a "hateful, unproductive conspiracy theory".
The TL:DR of stranded American POW's was this: Vietnam held onto more American POW's than they let on as ransom for post-war reconstruction funds, much like they did with France. Thanks to stalemates in congress and the Nixon fiasco, the reconstruction funds never arrived, and the remaining POW's were stranded. The American establishment saw them as a political liability, and Vietnam also eventually saw these men as a liability that would hurt their image abroad, so it's likely they all ended up working to death in camps, or executed.
John McCain pulled an AOC using his "muh heroic POW" status to attack the families of stranded POW's:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/mccain-and-the-pow-cover-up/
...The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.
The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
Much like the OPCW, and the groups AOC is a part of.
For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans’ groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain’s role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs.
"No OFFICIAL Grassootstm activists are pushing for it..."
That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.
The Arizona senator, now the Republican candidate for president, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon’s, and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief, and national security adviser, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush’s Defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.
...An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men.
...Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties... A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.
...McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
This is a McCain-led Catch-22 to effectively stop any action, while feigning action.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence—documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs’ sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned—has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the “bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “dime-store Rambos.”
These were the 1990's equivalent of modern "fake news" artists and "internet conspiracy theorists and trolls" that victimize heroes like AOC today.
...He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.
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