McCain’s funeral was a disgusting exercise in historical revisionism
John McCain’s death has inspired a slew of whitewashed obituaries, cringeworthy plaudits and declarations of love from both sides of the political divide — but as historical revisionism goes, his funeral was a step too far.
If there is anyone who owns the right to whitewash John McCain’s legacy, it is his daughter, Meghan McCain. In her hour of grief, we can permit her to rewrite her father’s personal history, to cast him as a hero among men. That much is to be expected — and few would take much issue with it.
But we cannot permit her to stand in front of the world, on the huge platform that she has been given, to rewrite and whitewash the Vietnam War — and that is exactly what she attempted to do at her father’s funeral.
It gives me no pleasure to be writing something like this about a person who has just died, or to take aim at a grieving daughter — but this is bigger than the McCain family and their hurt feelings. This is about a historical revisionism at its most disgusting and unacceptable.
As Meghan McCain spoke, even the most willing sycophants must have been discreetly raising their eyebrows and shifting uncomfortably in their pews. Standing before a cathedral packed to the rafters with politicians and high ranking military figures, she recast Vietnam, America’s most brutal and barbaric war, as a noble fight “for the life and liberty of other people’s in other lands”.
In her tribute to her father’s service, McCain reminded her audience, with a noticeable hint of venom in her voice that Vietnam was a “most distant and hostile corner of the world” in which to fight. Perhaps, she too shares her father’s well-known distaste for the Vietnamese, about whom he once wrote: "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”
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