Senator John McCain Has Been Around a While, But That's Fine With Imus

Having interviewed Meghan McCain just last week, Imus told her father Senator John McCain that she is adorable, well-spoken, and willing to say exactly what she means. “Remember—how you used to be?” he needled his guest.
 
President Obama, McCain’s opponent in the 2008 election, suffered a setback yesterday when the first civilian trial of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee resulted in the alleged terrorist being acquitted on 284 of the 285 counts against him.
 
“We have military commissions, and that’s the place for these trials, and they should be held at Guantanamo,” McCain, a Republican from Arizona, said. “We have a large court set up there, where we could get the job done.”
 
He was similarly critical of Obama not being able to secure a trade deal with South Korea during his recent trip to Asia. “There’s a perception of weakness in America,” McCain, who recently returned from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, said. Had Obama more vigorously pursued this trade deal over the last two years, McCain believes he would have been more successful.
 
“The bad news is South Korea now has been making trade agreements with other countries, including Europeans, which is basically preventing us from getting the market share that we would otherwise get,” he said, and criticized the administration for waiting too long before focusing on this issue.  
 
McCain acknowledged Imus’s point that South Korea, sensing this country’s economic difficulties, would assert their economic muscle regardless of who was President, but he argued that the situation in the U.S. remains precarious on a number of other issues, too.
 
“We should stop the spending, get our economy back in order, and also get the job done in Afghanistan, continue withdrawal from Iraq, and pay attention to the tensions that are clearly all around the world,” McCain said.
 
Is that all, Senator?
 
He praised General Motors on its rebound and impending IPO, which will afford it the ability to pay back the taxpayers who bailed them out early last year. But McCain regrets that the situation was not handled differently. “They could have gone into bankruptcy, and emerged, and done the same thing,” he said. “Instead, we bailed them out, and we put the unions ahead of everybody else, turning the normal bankruptcy procedure on it head.”
 
Back in Washington for the “lame duck” session of Congress, McCain joked that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “must think that it’s the last train out of town,” because he’s stacked the docket with loads of legislation to vote on before the new session begins in January.
 
“We used to take up bills, and have amendments, and debates, and now we take up a bill after he has closed out us having amendments on bills,” McCain said of Reid. “It’s not all his fault, but certainly the atmosphere here I’ve seen become very different than it was when I first arrived in the United States Senate back in 1896.”
 
He paused. “I’m sorry, I meant 1986.”
 
-Julie Kanfer