Cancer isn’t silencing McCain

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

John McCain couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump – so he talked about writing in his best friend’s name for president. After the election, he’s been the leading Senate Republican critic of Trump’s posture toward Russia. And from his Arizona home, where he’s battling brain cancer, the Arizona senator Thursday lobbed a new attack at the White House over its Syria policy.

The grave medical diagnosis hit the six-term senator just as he was settling into the latest notable role in his storied career. The ex-prisoner of war, former GOP presidential nominee and onetime standard-bearer of the political Straight Talk Express has emerged as a voice for what some Republicans feel is a party lost in the Trump era. He’s lambasted Trump as a defamer of military personnel, recoiled from Trump’s willingness to cozy up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and rejected Trump’s self-described boorishness toward women.

On Thursday, less than 24 hours after announcing he’d be undergoing treatment for glioblastoma, McCain promised – warned, really – that he won’t be gone for long.

“He is yelling at me to buck up so I’m gonna buck up,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, McCain’s close friend in the Senate.

It was classic McCain, whose candor offers a dose of authenticity and moxie at a time when his fellow Republicans control Congress and the presidency but are struggling to govern. His absence, however long, raises the prospect of a Senate without its sometimes trash-talking, yet also self-effacing, senator from Arizona for the first time in more than three decades.

On Thursday, from his home in Arizona, McCain said the administration would be “playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin” if, as The Washington Post reported, Trump was ending a program to back the Syrian opposition.