The new civility, surly old man edition
by digby
I don’t know how I missed this but it’s apalling, on a number of different levels:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that he will not apologize for calling protesters “low-life scum” at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this week.
“I think they’re terrible people,” McCain said of Code Pink, the women-led grassroots peace and social justice group that protested the hearing, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
McCain, the chairman of the committee, became particularly enraged when a member of the group dangled handcuffs over Kissinger’s head. “You’re gonna have to shut up or I’m going to have you arrested,” McCain said at the hearing. “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”
The Arizona Republican said Sunday that he stands by his comments because the protesters went beyond the bounds of constitutional free speech.
“I think they’re terrible people that would do that to a 91-year old man with a broken shoulder, to physically threaten him,” McCain said. “That is beyond any normal behavior I have ever observed.”
“I’m used to people popping up at these these hearings and yelling, and they’re escorted out — that’s at least some version of free speech,” he added. “These people rushed up, they were right next to him, waving handcuffs. He’s a 91-year old man with a broken shoulder who was willing to come down and testify before Congress to give us the benefit of his many years of wisdom.”
Who is the frail old man he’s talking about? A WWII veteran perhaps? An elderly inventor of an important code-breaking device? No. It was Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger, the man who has fingerprints all over every foreign policy disaster of the last half century, including Iraq:
From the new Wikileaks release “The Kissinger cables”:
“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
This seems like a good day to remind everyone of this little discussed tid-bit from Bob Woodward’s State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III:
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
It’s the anti-war protesters who are the “low life scum”?
And no they didn’t threaten him. They held up signs behind him and chanted. I’m sure it was unpleasant to be publicly called a war criminal. Not as unpleasant as being bombed, tortured and “disappeared” but unpleasant nonetheless:
If that’s the only punishment he receives for his deeds over the past 50 years, he’s one very lucky man indeed.