You can’t make this stuff up. The New York Times presents us with the only “respectable” option, given it’s all about “character” that can supposedly measure up to the national security state’s late great patriotic icon:
More than 100 former staff members for Senator John McCain are supporting Joseph R. Biden Jr., a show of support across the political divide that they hope amplifies the “Country First” credo of the former Arizona senator.
Many of the onetime McCain aides who signed the letter share his hawkish foreign policy views and recoil from Mr. Trump’s “America First” politics, which Mr. Salter called his “coddling of dictators or disinterest in our alliances.”
We should interject that in the late Senator McCain’s twisted Manichean worldview it was not at all “Country First” to begin with, more like “Which country to invade first?”
Here’s more from The Times:
The list of signatories includes a range of people — from chiefs of staff in Mr. McCain’s Senate office to junior aides on his campaigns — who worked for him over his 35 years in Congress and during two presidential bids.
Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s longtime chief aide and speechwriter, helped organize the letter.
“We have different views of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party platform — most of us will disagree with a fair amount of it — but we all agree that getting Donald Trump out of office is clearly in the national interest,” Salter said.
The Libertarian Institute’s Scott Horton summed it up best by noting sarcastically, John McCain’s staff just endorsed Biden, “explicitly because he’s worse on war” – meaning that the very thing that most common sense people long considered to be the worst thing about McCain and his legacy becomes a “virtue” in the eyes of his former staff and writers at the NY Times.
Look who’s glowingly proud:
“We believe we are acting in accord with John McCain’s charge to put “country first” when we urge Americans to elect former vice president Biden and Sen. Harris the next president and vice president of the United States.” https://t.co/k7mLOuNeTb
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 27, 2020
And Horton underscores further:
Got that? “Country First” means world empire and endless war; while on the contrary, “America First” means world empire and endless war at the hands of someone who whines about it sometimes.
Tragically, as Bonnie Kristan in The Week recently observed, the anti-war wing of both parties is effectively dead.