John McCain used to ride something called the Straight Talk Express. It was his own campaign bus and, in a subtle piece of branding, the candidate prided himself on his honesty.

Whatever McCain is riding today, it has nothing to do with straight talk and everything to do with political pandering.

First the Arizona senator trumped Donald Trump’s remarks about Orlando by accusing President Obama of being “directly responsible” for the mass murders there.

“Directly responsible because he pulled everybody out of Iraq,” McCain explained to reporters on Thursday. “I predicted at the time that Isis would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. It’s a matter of record. So he is directly responsible.”

Then he issued a statement claiming to have made a mistake, but simply restating his attack.

“I misspoke,” he said. “I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obama’s national security decisions, not the president himself.” The statement failed to explain how a president could make a decision yet not be personally responsible for the same decision.

Perhaps McCain isn’t really responsible for his own comments either. In which case, this column should be read solely as a commentary on McCain’s mouth, rather than on McCain’s brain.

It’s hard to know what’s more offensive here: the shameless exploitation of a terrorist attack for political gain, the grotesque self-congratulation about a national tragedy or the brazen pretense of a non-apology.

At least Trump only suggested that the commander-in-chief was secretly rooting for the terrorists. McCain placed the personal blame for the attacks squarely on the man who beat him in a landslide in 2008. Somehow the senator made a reality TV star look like a statesman, particularly if we use his own logic against him.

It was, of course, McCain who was one of the biggest cheerleaders of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Without that disastrous decision, there would have been no civil war, no al-Qaida in Iraq (which evolved into Isis), and no failed state for Isis to use as its base of operations.



Using McCain’s train of thought, the Arizona senator is himself directly responsible for the deaths of almost 4,500 US troops and more than 150,000 civilians. Oh, and Orlando too.

At this point, we could explain McCain’s outlandish accusation as the result of one of three factors: Obama Derangement Syndrome, his shoot-from-the-hip temperament or his unexpectedly close re-election contest in Arizona this year. Or possibly all of the above.

McCain has suffered from ODS since his epic defeat in 2008. Despite his purported foreign policy expertise, he was one of the first to find a conspiracy in Benghazi among the talking points prepared for Sunday TV shows. He has threatened to sue Obama for wanting to close Guantánamo Bay, even though he too has said it should close.

As for his temperament, McCain’s rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ persona was always one of the personal traits that endeared him least to his fellow senators. This is a man who came to blows with Iowa’s Chuck Grassley during a Senate committee meeting on Vietnam prisoners of war. He also picked Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee, so he knows a thing or two about making great decisions.

Then there’s the question of his close re-election. Four years ago Mitt Romney won Arizona by nine points. Today, the polls show that Donald Trump is only tying Hillary Clinton there, and McCain’s polls are not much better against his Democratic opponent.

The last time this happened, when he was running against tough primary opposition in the Tea Party year of 2010, McCain became a different kind of politician. He abandoned his previous support for immigration reform and released TV ads urging officials to “complete the danged fence”.

This is the slippery downhill path chosen by John McCain and his fellow Republicans: if you buckled before the Tea Party six years ago, it’s not much worse to mimic the sound of Donald Trump today.

In many ways, McCain back in 2000 was the Donald Trump of a more innocent time: an era before 9/11, Iraq and the financial collapse.

He was also running against another Bush, whom he belittled in crude ways: he said the Texas governor had learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes, a line of attack first hurled at Bill Clinton in 1992. (And a pretty good one at that.)

McCain was a maverick, anti-establishment candidate with vast media appeal, who promised to reform a broken political system, or what he called the iron triangle of big money, lobbyists and legislation.

Like Trump, he knew that iron triangle better than anyone. He was enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal as one of a group of senators accused of pressuring federal regulators to back off their corrupt donor Charles Keating. He survived to become a crusader for campaign finance reform and against pork barrel spending.

Today, after 33 years in Congress, the 79-year-old senator is about as establishment as it gets. He doesn’t need to run again, and he certainly doesn’t need to pander to the Trump-loving voters of Arizona. He could have been a maverick, but the 2008 defeat seems to have twisted his political judgment into a pretzel.

So welcome aboard, Senator. Please keep your seatbelt buckled in case of turbulence. And thank you for choosing Trump Air.