From McCain's essay in the Sat WSJ:
Vladimir Putin is an evil man, and he is intent on evil deeds, which include the destruction of the liberal world order that the United States has led and that has brought more stability, prosperity and freedom to humankind than has ever existed in history. He is exploiting the openness of our society and the increasingly acrimonious political divisions consuming us. He wants to widen those divides and paralyze us from responding to his aggression. He meddled in one election, and he will do it again because it worked and because he has not been made to stop.
Putin’s goal isn’t to defeat a candidate or a party. He means to defeat the West.
President Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what Putin is doing to just not caring about it. To his credit, he overturned the Obama policy and supplied lethal assistance to Ukraine. But he needs to comprehend the nature of the threat Putin poses. He needs to understand Putin’s nature, and ours.
Last year, President Trump implied that our government was morally equivalent to Putin’s regime: “We got a lot of killers—what, you think our country’s so innocent?” he told an interviewer. It was a shameful thing to say and so unaware of reality. He said it as Russian bombs fell on Aleppo hospitals, as Ukrainian soldiers defended their country from another Russian attack, as the most vile false accusations pitting Americans against Americans coursed through social media, disseminated by an army of trolls paid by Putin to destroy the fraying bonds that hold our society together.
We must fight Vladimir Putin as determinedly as he fights us. We will stop him when we stop letting our partisan and personal interests expose our national security interests, even the integrity of our democracy and the rule of law, to his predation. We will stop him when we start believing in ourselves again and when we remember that our exceptionalism hasn’t anything to do with what we are—prosperous, powerful, envied—but with who we are: a people united by ideals, not ethnicity or geography, and determined to stand by those values, not just here at home but throughout the world.
I agree that Putin is Evil. He puts Russia first and wants to re-create the Russian/Soviet Empire. He wants buffer zones. He didn't want NATO on his borders. Fair enough, we wouldn't want the Warsaw Pact/Russian Forces on ours.
However, Putin's "meddling" in our election was lame, at best. $250,000 of few memes, some fake FB pages, and the equivalent of 4 seconds of what gets uploaded on Youtube everyday is not "meddling", it's not even what a half-assed PAC spends on TV in a day. No votes were changed, no machines tampered with.
Trump wanted to attempt to work with Putin to solve the Syria problem (The one Obama and Hillary created). There was an opportunity to come to some type of solution (I don't know what), that could have possibly reduced the loss of life and the brought peace to the region (after destroying ISIS). But the russia, Russia, RUSSIA !!! thing worked to prevent any dialogue between the US and Russia, because any attempt would be met with "LOOK !!!! MORE COLLUSION !!!". So we bomb away and bomb the Syrian army for fake chemical attacks.
And the only reason there is such discord (much, much more than usual) in US politics is because of the Anti/NeverTrumpers like McCain. He's taken every opportunity to get in his digs at Trump. ie Voting against Obamacare repeal, saying he doesn't want Trump at his Funeral. That last being very cheap and petty.
If McCain had truly lead after the election, he would have recognized that Trump is now the President and the de facto leader of the party. Showing his support and loyalty would have shown what kind of person and leader he was. (Yes, you can still disagree on various policy positions, that's expected), but a lot of what McCain did was out of spite. Again. Petty and Childish. That colours my opinion of the man.
