Last week was pretty quiet, comparatively.  John McCain’s passing kept our National Embarrassment off the front pages.  His final, decent act.  Even in death, McCain out-maneuvered Trump.  Out-maneuvering Trump isn’t much of a trick, I know.  Hell, a squirrel could out-maneuver Trump.  But McCain did it dead!  You gotta respect that.  He didn’t just make the right squeaky noises like the rest of the GOP.  He didn’t have positions.  He had principles.  He was, I think, the last bulwark defending what’s left of America from the foil hat right.

I’m digressing a bit, here, but I used to enjoy debating various topics with my right-leaning brethren.  Then I became aware they were taking religious stands – that is, there was nothing, and I mean NOTHING, that could convince them to reconsider their unsupported assertions.  It’s the old, “God said it, I believe it and that settles it!” position except with ‘Fox and Fiends’ replacing God.  THEN I discovered – OMG – they were “with Q.”  Full-on conspiracy theorists.  Nuts.  It’s not fun debating them anymore.  I don’t think it’s ethical to pick on the disabled…

McCain didn’t play that game.  He did what he thought was right.  He wasn’t always.  He was part of the “Keating Five”, the bi-partisan group that set up the artificial housing bubble that crashed the Eighties and destroyed the Savings and Loan industry, replacing it with Credit Unions.  But that was just more right-wing “less regulation is better” bullshit.  I think McCain learned from his mistakes and, honestly, who can ask more from anybody than that?  Everyone makes mistakes.  The measure of intelligence is ‘how many times’…

I’m glad we get this weekend to savor the relative quiet of last week.  McCain cast the vote that kept the Affordable Care Act alive – for a little while longer, anyway.  Now I expect the GOP to eliminate it entirely.  It benefits Americans.  The GOP can’t have that.

I’ll tell you this: I don’t know who Doug Ducey (R), the current Governor of Arizona, will appoint in McCain’s place.  I don’t know much about Ducey.  Is he old-school, loyal-opposition GOP or the more modern disloyal-opposition, burn-it-to-the-ground GOP?  We’ll all find out together.  But either way, we’ll not see John McCain’s like again…

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In an effort to pretend Facebook has it’s users best interest at heart, they’re no longer allowing me to post automatically from my blog site directly to Facebook.  If I forget to manually post it, you might miss out.  It makes more sense, to me, to just go to my blog site – The Bacon Press (www.mybaconpress.com) <– that’s a link – and click on the little button at the bottom that says subscribe.  They’ll ask for an email address and it LOOKS like they’re asking you to “join” WordPress.  In truth, though, they just need the email so they can forward these little bits of (hey, you fill in the blank) directly to your inbox…