John McCain, a US Senator from the Republican Party, is one of the most famous US politicians in Russia. He is best known for his "unbending stance" on the US-Russian relations. In a nutshell, McCain's stance on Russia is all about most stringent opposition.
Clearly, McCain positions his fight with Putin and Russia as a purely ideological and principled matter. In fact, everything is more complicated. We will try to understand what moves US senators in their public political work.
It is worth mentioning that the current term in the Senate is likely to be McCain's last for a number of reasons.
Age is the first reason.
It is not even about the age of Mr. McCain himself. The Republican Party has accepted many younger members in its ranks recently. Those people want to move up on the career ladder too. For example, it goes about the Tea Party Movement. One of the brightest representatives of the well-known movement is Rand Paul.
This movement has a very simple concept: "minimum state, maximum freedom, the government is the enemy of the people." During the reign of Barack Obama, who became famous for his "leftist" initiatives in domestic policies primarily at the expense of taxpayers, the Tea Party Movement gained tremendous popularity among rightist electors.
McCain was not the case. Opinion polls from 2014 awarded John McCain with a title of the most unpopular senator in the United States. His anti-rating made up 53-55%. In Arizona, the state from which McCain came to the Senate, the Tea Party Movement steamrolled the entire system of primaries. McCain regained party power in Arizona, albeit with great difficulty, and the results were indicative.
Republican Kelly Ward opposed McCain during primaries for the Senate. She is a convinced supporter of Donald Trump and his economic and political course. McCain won the primaries by a margin of only ten percent. His campaign was built on a promise not to put spokes in Trump's wheels. McCain forgot about that soon afterwards.
In Arizona, John McCain defeated the Democrats to by a minimum margin of 53% against 40%. Arizona is a traditionally Republican state that advocates the tightening of migration policy, and, in general, does not mind a "wall on the border with Mexico."
McCain started implementing his campaign promises in a very peculiar way. For example, he supported the feminist and LGBT march against Donald Trump. That was a move that one could not expect from Mr. McCain, who identifies himself as a conservative.
Noteworthy, John McCain's second wife and daughter are activists of the LGBT movement. This may explain McCain's votes against the amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage on the federal level.
John McCain supports the bill that complicates the life of those owning firearms, speaks in favour of the liberalisation of migration legislation and harshly criticises Trump's move to introduce visa restriction for citizens of a number of Muslim countries.
During the first term of George W. Bush, there were only two mad people in the Republican faction in the Senate, who voted against the tax cuts program. Of course, one of them was John McCain.
Originally, at the peak of political popularity, McCain positioned himself as a lone character with an independent, a third position on any issue. It became clear in the last decade that he is just a typical Democrat who pretends to be a Republican, and reluctantly mumbles conservative stuff at times.
Why does John McCain behave like that? Well, this is because Arizona is a Republican state, and he has to "play a fool."
John McCain's two-edged stance on war issues is most interesting. McCain is known for his captivity in Vietnam. His rhetoric shows him as a supporter of war as a solution to many problems.
In 2008, American journalists exposed details of how McCain was deceiving the US military with his political promises. US war veterans were not getting any assistance from the veteran senator. To make matters worse, McCain showed his complete incompetence on fundamental issues of Middle East policies.
The Senator's policy is simple: let's bomb them all. John McCain does not distinguish between Sunni with Shia people. He also believes that Al Qaeda is an elite combat unit in the Iranian government.
McCain's military career also has a number of interesting details.
Before making his first sortie, Mr. McCain had crashed at least two planes. His grandfather was an admiral, his father was an admiral too. During the war in Vietnam, John McCain's father was the commander of the Pacific front. John McCain was trying not to defame his family name. However, he had "waged war" for only ten hours before he found himself captured in Vietnam. John McCain received a pretty collection of medals for five years of his Vietnamese captivity, which many honest war veterans in the USA found insulting for themselves.
Of course, McCain was saying that he was tortured in captivity. However, it appears that all of his terrible bone fractures were a consequences of his ejection from the airplane.
Interestingly, John McCain received medical treatment at a hospital in Vietnam. As a rule, they accommodate prisoners of war at hospitals for their collaboration. The Vietnamese realised that McCain was the son of the commander of the Pacific front, so they put him in a hospital as a valuable POW.
John McCain was collaborating with the Vietnamese as a propagandist. He would make radio recordings, in which he would say that he was a bad aggressor and call the Vietnamese the good guys. He would give interviews to communist and antiwar correspondents and so on.
In 2008, when the Senator was running for president, progressive journalists went to Vietnam, where they found his "curator."
The "curator" told them (the BBC) that no one tortured McCain. On the contrary, everyone would always be nice and polite with him.
John McCain's "heroic halo" has been fading since 2008.
It is believed that during presidential primaries, McCain did everything to defeat Bush. Kerry, a Democratic candidate, offered McCain the post of Vice President.
McCain had enough political intuition to decline the offer. If he had accepted it, his career of the senator could have ended very quickly. Arizona voters simply would not have understood such warm friendship with the "democratic candidate."
During John Kerry's political campaign, rumours appeared saying that Kerry was a fake veteran. McCain rushed to help his friend, although the story about fake medals and veteran status ruined Kerry's campaign.
Obama said that McCain was a true veteran and a hero. McCain then said that Obama had nothing to do with Islam and Islamists. At the same time, it was soon revealed that McCain himself was sympathising with Arabs and Islamists, whom he called "moderate opposition" or "Iranian Guards."
One can understand McCain's friendship with Saudi Arabia, because the Saudis have a lot of money. John McCain is good at working for foreign governments - he showed it during the time of the war in Vietnam.
Donald Trump said once: "I like people who weren't captured." Quite an innuendo.
Today, John McCain goes against the Trump administration and plays on the side of Saudi Arabia and all sorts of Islamist groups. It appears that Senator McCain has lost all of his supporters. His position on Russia and Putin is like a vague scenery for American voters.
"I would say John McCain's been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades. He advocated for the Iraq War, which I think destabilised the Middle East. He would bankrupt the nation. We're very lucky John McCain's not in charge, because I think we'd be in perpetual war," Rand Paul said recently.
Anatoly Lantov
Alexander Chausov
Oleg Volodin.