John McCain casually expressed the desire to rain death down upon a country with which we were not at war and which had not done anything to us. If anything could be worse than that, he expressed it as a JOKE. He made the joke by parodying a love song, a beloved love song recognized by tens of millions of people worldwide. And then he couldn’t even deliver the joke properly. I would like to think that some part of him realized the obscenity, that he was ashamed of the joke even as he told it, resulting in his awkward, half-ass delivery. Instead, I suspect his embarrassment is because he thinks singing is too gay, or something.
Having said that, I’m not sure that I share your feelings, exactly. I can’t say I really feel sad about his illness. Instead, my own reaction is more sangfroid than schadenfreude. It’s not because I’m such a high-minded person, either. It’s just that the passing of these horrible people when they are elderly feels empty more than anything. They’ve already done all their damage. If Augusto Pinochet had keeled over dead of a heart attack in 1975, I might have figured it was a good thing. If it had happened in 1970, even better — way better, but we would never have known how much. Instead, he just died, at 91. Everybody dies. He won! Pinochet, Thatcher, Nixon, Kissinger (still with us!), Brzezinski, Stalin, Mao — they all won. Having McCain out of the Senate will be a good thing, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. He will probably be replaced by someone worse.
