Meghan McCain Should Grieve Not Bully

Under Obamacare, which supposedly expanded the protections of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act of 2008 allowing for treatment of mental health to be reimbursed like other medical costs, mental health treatment has still not effectively reached the one in five of us who require counseling. Even lovers of Obamacare note that there are serious deficiencies in the availability and access to needed mental health services. (See NPR which noted this in 2017).

Mental health counseling is necessary for one in five Americans according to NAMI, and perhaps, Meghan McCain's weird public response to Ken Starr's comments about the stain of the Steele dossier on John McCain and President Trump's agreement with that and President Trump's assertion that McCain's down-vote on Obamacare repeal and replace was a worse stain, indicates that she is one of those one in five this year.

Why worry about what she did: We should all worry about Meghan McCain's tweeted response to President Trump because she illustrates how we're creating media bullies. Meghan McCain immaturely asserted that her dad was loved more than Donald Trump and was a better father, a babyish, personal attack irrelevant to and divorced from a fair assessment of John McCain's public actions as a public person and a member of our government.

OK, she's grieving, still not an excuse to mix up fact-opinion, still not an excuse to assert that John McCain is entitled to immunity from a review and assessment of his lifetime of political actions in the public sphere.

Ken Starr noted McCain's role in publicizing the dossier as a "stain" on McCain, and considering its falsehood it was. Yes, some still argue that the dossier contains some "true things," an argument as illogical as one that asserts that a stopped clock is still right twice a day and therefore tells time.

President Trump used the remark to enlarge the stains of McCain to include the down-vote on the repeal and replace Republican plan for Obamacare. A fair assessment considering the Republicans, including McCain had spent years criticizing Obamacare and promising something better and starkly failed in the years before and since Donald Trump's election. Also fair considering that McCain like all members of Congress who reaped benefits of taxpayer funded healthcare was hardly a representative of the "little" people, those outside government.

We get it, Meghan McCain is grieving. We also get that she has access to any counseling available in the US thanks in part to her legacy of being John McCain's daughter. But rather than make me more sympathetic, her use of her public status to grieve and personally attack someone who attacks her public-figure father for his public actions who also happens to be the President and the father of a child is not only bullying but is illustrative of her inability to understand what it means to earn your living off the public as her father did.

Perhaps through counseling, McCain can explore the still notorious lack of availability of mental health services with barriers of cost and choice for the millions of people hemmed in by the perpetual flaws in the Obamacare system, even cited by Obamacare diehard fans like NPR in 2017.

Perhaps through counseling, McCain can learn that doing for others counts and work with groups inspiring fathers to be strong role models of support, responsibility and involvement with their children.

Perhaps through counseling McCain would learn that telling a child his father is bad, telling a person they're not "loved" as much as another is bullying, nonproductive, immature and offered for no reason besides distraction from your family's problems and a cheap attempt to make someone else appear inadequate.

Perhaps the media should support Meghan McCain in obtaining such grief counseling and additional counseling to prepare her for the no doubt many less than stellar reviews of her public figure dad, and her public figure self.