Kari Lake believes Sen. John McCain's ghost controls Arizona's Republican Party

I’m beginning to think that the late Sen. John McCain is even busier in the afterlife than he was during his allotted 81 years on this mortal coil.

He continues driving the fringiest of fringe Republicans to utter distraction.

Most recently, it is Kari Lake, GOP candidate for Arizona governor and voluntarily shameless political handmaiden of Donald Trump.

Several times after the senator’s passing I’ve noted how McCain seemed to take a slight detour on his way to heaven a few years back, stopping inside the head of President Donald Trump, where he took out what appears to be a long-term lease.

Likewise, McCain seems to have haunted Trump sycophants, some of them even before his passing.

McCain haunted Kelli Ward and Wendy Rogers

For example, Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward.

You may recall that during her attempt to win the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in 2018, Ward suggested that a statement issued by McCain's family about ending his treatment for brain cancer was intended to hurt her campaign.

McCain also appears to have visited the apparently unoccupied cranium of Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who categorized the former Navy pilot, POW, Republican presidential candidate, and long-time senator in the same company with the traitor Benedict Arnold and the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Then again, Rogers does appear to have a slight fixation with the afterlife, recently raging about “satanic demons” posting messages about her online.

Now there is Lake, who said in a recent interview that she believes McCain is “reaching up from the grave trying to keep power in Arizona.”

And more.

Now Kari Lake think's he's haunting the GOP

Lake said, “I think we’re learning a lot about what McCain was up to. I just saw a video him from several years back in Ukraine. And he was a very powerful politician. He wielded a ton of power. He ran Arizona with an iron fist. He controlled the entire political scene in Arizona. From top to bottom. And they don’t want to give up that power.

“John McCain may be dead but he is reaching up from the grave trying to keep power in Arizona. And it was never about power that helped the people of Arizona. It was never about that. It was about maintaining his power, incredible power, in the entire U.S., world power, and he had complete power over Arizona. And rarely did he do anything good for the people, and the people are aware of that, they are trying. They are on their last gasp.“

I’d guess that during her many years as a news reader on TV, Lake was handed scripts that talked about how Sen. McCain was at odds in one way or anything with Arizona’s Republican Party.

And she must know that while he was alive and all the time since his death he has been attacked by former President Donald Trump, who led the GOP far, FAR away from the direction McCain wanted the party to take.

Maybe it's not the party, but Trump and his toadies

For instance, the way Trump cozied up the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, about which McCain said, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

McCain added, “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. … President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin (and) made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.”

So, it’s not the Arizona Republican Party that McCain’s ghost is “reaching up from the grave” to haunt. It is Trump and his toadies.

And based on Lake’s comments, the spirit of the late senator is continuing to do so, or, as she said, “maintaining his power, incredible power.”

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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