It's no secret that John McCain is one of the biggest hawks in Congress. A close ally of raving South Carolina lunatic Lindsey Graham, John McCain has been advocating for a Syrian "troop surge", calling protesters are "low-life scum", and joking about bombing Iran for many, many years.

Even former President Jimmy Carter has publicly labeled McCain a "warmonger." Yet, despite McCain's record of sounding utterly unreasonable at nearly every turn, the corporate news media continues to treat McCain's hyper-neoconservatism as perfectly normal.

Well, it isn't. And John McCain was determined to make that clear this week.

Capitalizing on an atmosphere where all mainstream criticism of Donald Trump must automatically be paired with neo-Cold War hysteria and anti-Russian conspiracy theories, McCain didn't miss his opportunity to further tarnish his legacy.

On the floor of the US Senate, McCain lashed out at fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul for opposing a unanimous consent request that would support Montenegro becoming a NATO member.

Rand Paul, like his father former Congressman Ron Paul, has been an opponent to NATO expansion for quite some time. Even on Monday, the younger Paul tweeted an article by CATO Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow explaining that NATO has become too large.

After Paul objected to the legislation in the Senate, McCain became enraged.

"(Sen. Paul) has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians," MccCain said. "So, I repeat again: The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."

Rarely do US Senators accuse each other of being foreign agents on the floor of the US Senate. In many ways it was reminiscent of the "Red scare" during the 1950s when Sen. Joe McCarthy said Communists had infiltrated the government.

Sen. Paul responded to Sen. McCain earlier today on MSNBC's Morning Joe by saying, “You know, I think he makes a really, really strong case for term limits. I think maybe he’s past his prime; I think maybe he’s gotten a little bit unhinged.”

One wonders, however, if he instead could have repeated Boston lawyer Joseph Welch's famous line to Sen. McCarthy:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness... You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"