I have personally known a few Code Pink members during my own years of protest, and I take personal offense at his statement. Terrible people? Senator, who in HELL are you to judge?Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that he will not apologize for calling protesters "low-life scum" at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this week.
The Grumpy Old Man™
"I think they're terrible people," McCain said of Code Pink, the women-led grassroots peace and social justice group that protested the hearing, in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."
Code Pink brought signs and handcuffs into the hearing to protest the presence of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, demanding that he be arrested for his role in alleged war crimes during the Nixon and Ford administrations. The protesters objected to the U.S.'s use of the poisonous chemical Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia and other issues.
McCain, the chairman of the committee, became particularly enraged when a member of the group dangled handcuffs over Kissinger's head. "You're gonna have to shut up or I'm going to have you arrested," McCain said at the hearing. "Get out of here, you low-life scum."
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And for the record, though I thought at one time you were among the more moderate Republicans out there, I have been disabused of that notion long since. I think you're a TERRIBLE PERSON.
You may be a superb political savant, and you clearly were a helluva pilot, but you are an utter failure as a human being, and your deplorable slander of one of the signature antiwar groups of our era proves it.
Go to Hell, Senator; you'll fit in just fine there.