Say McCain, Say McCain

For all our justified criticism of Meghan McCain, I can concede that she’s had a rough year, having to publicly mourn her father while the president of the United States keeps punching the man’s corpse.

Speaking on the View on Thursday, Whoopi Goldberg let McCain open the show by addressing President Donald Trump’s latest feud with a dead man: the White House having ordered the U.S. Navy to hide the U.S.S. John S. McCain, named after three generations of John McCains, during Trump’s trip to Japan.

Trump, speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, denied knowing anything about the order, saying he wouldn’t have ordered the ship to be moved, before listing all the ways in which the former Arizona senator still manages to irk him from the grave.

Meghan McCain didn’t buy Trump’s excuse, telling the View audience that she had multiple journalists contacting her over the weekend to tell her about the directive before getting into how she’s sick of having to talk about her dead dad all the time.

“Just putting a note on this, there’s a lot of criticism towards me in the media across the board of how often I speak about my father, how I grieve, how I do it publicly, but it’s impossible to go through the grief process when my father, who’s been dead 10 months, is constantly in the news cycle because the president is so obsessed with the fact that he’s never going to be a great man like he was,” McCain said. “It’s a bizarre way to grieve, it’s a bizarre way to say goodbye to my dad.”

Sure. Yes. OK. But also, Meghan, another reason your dad is always in the news is because….you keep talking about him on your national television show.

Alas, my sympathy for McCain was soon tabled by View guest and Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who minced no words when telling McCain why she’s chosen, unlike many other 2020 candidates, not to do a Fox News town hall. McCain, who previously worked at Fox News, told Warren she saw it “shortsighted” and a mistake to not speak to the network’s audience.

“Here’s the deal about Fox News executives, and that is, they’re running a hate-for-profit scam,” Warren responded, explaining that the network is giving a platform to white nationalism and anti-immigrant narratives, all the while using the high ratings and Democratic town halls to show advertisers jumping ship that the network is ripe for profit and wholly not as toxic as their loudest commentators.

“I’m just not going to give them a full hour to help them raise money, and help get credibility because they were willing to talk to me for an hour,” Warren said.

When McCain pushed back, saying she was proud of her time at the network, that she doesn’t think Fox News is racist, and thinks Warren is alienating Fox News’ audience, Warren continued: “I’ll go all around the country, I want to talk to people, and find as many ways to reach out as I can. I am just not going to help the Fox News executives raise money off my name.”