“Republican Senator John McCain traveled across the Atlantic yesterday to deliver to Europe (at the Munich Security Conference) a calculated, point-by-point repudiation of Trump's worldview and brand of nationalism. McCain didn't mention Trump's name once, but he didn't have to.”
Here are the highlights:
1. “In recent years, this question [of the survival of the Western world] would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism; not this year. If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.”
2. The founders of the Munich conference “would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism.”
3. “They would be alarmed by the hardening resentment we see towards immigrants and refugees and minority groups -- especially Muslims.”
4. “They would be alarmed by the growing inability -- and even unwillingness -- to separate truth from lies.”
5. "They would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent."
6. “But what would alarm them most, I think, is a sense that many of our peoples, including in my own country, are giving up on the West, that they see it as a bad deal that we may be better off without, and that while Western nations still have the power to maintain our world order, it's unclear whether we have the will.”
7. “I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. That's not the message you heard today from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. That is not the message you will hear from Vice President Mike Pence. That's not the message you will hear from Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. And that is certainly not the message you will hear tomorrow from our bipartisan congressional delegation.
8. “I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries [i.e., Putin]. I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it. For if we do not, who will?”
Translated: Trump is deeply dangerous to everything America holds dear. I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to try to dump him. But if he keeps going in the direction he's going, I'll have no choice.
John McCain: ‘In the four decades I have attended the Munich Security Conference, I cannot recall a year where its purpose was more necessary or more important.”
Don’t Count America Out
Sen. John McCain Addresses The Munich Security Conference (2/17/2017)
