By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — In 1981, handsome national pop icon Neil Diamond’s powerful, pounding, proud Coming to America was released as a single and shot up the charts.
Not considered a bit controversial, the song hailed the historic, healthy immigration experience of the United States and left so many in the audience cheering, or with tears in their eyes.
The next year, 1982, Vietnam War celebrity and political novice John McCain was elected to his first term as a congressman from Arizona’s First District.
A bit controversial, McCain was criticized by some as a carpetbagger for moving to the Grand Canyon State with political ambitions. If he wasn’t so healthy, he’d been tortured in Asia.
The GOP primary for the open seat was heated, with the eventual winner virtually guaranteed to triumph in the conservative district’s November general election.
McCain beat three other Republicans to take the primary, although he got a plurality of less than one-third of the total vote cast.
Fast forward nearly four decades. Time had done what it always does. It moves on, whether those walking through the years with it are ready or not.
In January 2018, just before turning 77 years of age, still-active Neil Diamond announced he was cutting short a performing tour because of his recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
He still was delivering his heartwarming 1969 hit Sweet Caroline, but by now she would have become Grandma Caroline, if not Great-Grandma. No longer a college girl. And he looked every bit Granddad.
In July 2017, McCain, shortly before turning 81, revealed he had aggressive brain cancer.
McCain had been elected to a sixth consecutive U.S. Senate term the previous November. However, in the August 2016 GOP primary contest — despite his long service, or perhaps because of it — he fell short of gaining even 52 percent of the total vote, with four candidates’ names on the ballot.
By 2017, McCain looked every bit his age. As 2018 arrived, he was spending more time back in Phoenix for cancer treatment, but still throwing his shadow on Washington, D.C.
A Christian Science Monitor article posted February 6 was headlined, “Even in his absence, McCain’s influence is strongly felt.” The second paragraph noted that McCain had just teamed up with liberal Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, of Delaware, on a new immigration bill.
It wasn’t the kind of responsible bill that President Trump would like, nor was it the strong approach to the issue that locked up the presidency for the Manhattan multibillionaire who won voters disgusted by politicians’ border sleight-of-hand.
Optimism and compassion must wish an unlikely recovery for McCain. That would delight his family. Realism probably means a different outcome. On the battlefield, realism, not fond hopes, must be the order of the day.
McCain no longer is in a Hanoi prison but the prison of his ailing body — a prison cell we all will occupy someday, for a briefer or longer period.
Defiance may have sustained McCain against Communist Vietnamese captors. If he was suitably contemptuous of the Reds, he could have decades of life ahead of him. But the sands in the hourglass have trickled down, never to return.
Whose admiration is porous-borders McCain seeking now, with control of his own fate meaningfully out of his hands?
It’s time for McCain to stop defying his own voters. It’s time for McCain to make his peace with them instead of hurling another act of defiance with yet another hollowed-out border bill.
When he was desperate for votes, McCain knew what voters wanted. His elite East Coast friends cringed and gasped in 2010 when McCain, running for Senate re-election, strode along the border in an Arizona campaign commercial, demanding to “complete the danged fence.”
It was McCain’s voice, not Donald Trump’s, that began that commercial reciting the horrors, “Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder.” So powerful did McCain’s stand seem that the commercial ended with McCain-admiring Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu assuring him, “Senator, you’re one of us.”
Who was “us”? The globalist, open-borders elite? Or those who worriedly pace the border, concerned about “Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder”?
John McCain has poured so much of his service and strength into keeping the border porous that drunken, previously deported illegal-alien drivers routinely continue to slaughter legal U.S. residents. They rob them, threaten them, pound them, knife them. It was happening again even as McCain teamed up with Coons on the latest bill.
After Trump honored the parents of innocent teen-age girls murdered by a violent illegals gang during his well-received State of the Union speech, Trump’s leftist foes shrieked once again about his being racist.
The bloody crimes that leftist politicians and media enable — including massive permissive abortion, too — are something they have no way of explaining away. So they just shriek their derision and hope that beclouds everyone else’s mind. But it must not, or Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency.
Thus, on February 6 the White House issued another statement citing Trump’s determination to quell criminal activity by the border-crossing MS-13 gang. It said MS-13 is active in at least 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. As most Americans know, this isn’t crime confined to a few border counties.
“Approximately 38 percent of all murders in Suffolk County, N.Y., between January 2016 and June 2017 were linked to MS-13,” the statement said.
Long Island, N.Y., is more than 2,500 miles from border-straddling Nogales, Ariz.
Some criminals may not be geniuses, but often they’re crafty. What criminal wouldn’t want to get into a country where political correctness for long years coddled and excused their dangerous invasion? Leftist politicians and media as usual completely garble the debate and say that to want responsible border control and vetting of crossers are racism and hate.
At least they’ll say that until one of the criminals comes crawling through their own windows or smashing into their own cars.
A Poisoned Image
Arizona conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on February 7 that it’s no surprise McCain was introducing yet another weak border bill.
Querard said: “John McCain loves amnesty and has no interest in border security. He’s been that way for as long as anyone can remember, except during election years. So McCain introducing a bill with Democrats to grant amnesty and ignore the border is entirely consistent with the real John McCain.”
McCain’s Arizona teammate, freshman GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, used McCain’s type of campaign ruse in his first Senate race, in 2012. Already known for his porous-border preferences, Flake proclaimed he’d had a big conversion. He even announced in printed campaign mailers, “Comprehensive immigration reform is a dead end.”
That pose lasted just long enough to get him narrowly elected. But the lie helped poison his image enough that he dared not run for a second Senate term this year. That’s something worth remembering as Flake strides around these days boasting of his shining moral superiority over allegedly scrofulous beings like border-walling Trump.
Years passing soften some heartbreaks, but cast into sharp relief other changes.
In 1981 I loved Neil Diamond and loved his beautiful Coming to America. Much of what happened since, though, redefined immigration into porous-borders invasion and poisoned what had been the healthy growth of the U.S.
Much of that ugly transformation has been at the hands of now ill John McCain and his brother border botchers. Give it up, John. Make your peace and become “one of us” again.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress