Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate running for Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema‘s seat, has been criticized for telling former John McCain-supporters to “get the hell out” of a local GOP event.
Lake’s derogatory comments about the late 2008 GOP presidential candidate and longtime Arizona Senator ignited a feud with McCain’s daughter, conservative political pundit Meghan McCain, who has not accepted Lake’s recent explanation that her comments were “made in jest.”
[Note: Lake also said: “The GOP was the party of McCain — it was bad. Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”]
With two months to go before the Arizona GOP primary (July 30), Lake yesterday denounced her Democratic opposition using a Soviet-era reference, employing the old shorthand for state-run media: Pravda. It’s an example of how far McCain’s long shadow extends — and correspondingly what Lake must contend with in trying to win Arizona’s “McCain Republicans” — that even a reference to Pravda brings up, for political observers with long memories, a link to the late Senator.
Lake wrote: “The radical left & their Pravda press want to divide us & deflate our spirit, our joy, & our energy.”
The radical left & their Pravda press want to divide us & deflate our spirit, our joy, & our energy.
We can’t get discouraged, no matter how bad things get.
The vast majority of Americans want to come together & make this country great again.
They fully support President… pic.twitter.com/JpjXvld5cq
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) June 3, 2024
Pravda, founded in 1912, was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. (Lake means to imply that today’s corporate media plays a similar role for Democrats in the U.S., a claim critics say is easily refuted by an examination of the frequency — and overall favorability — of the coverage Donald Trump and far-right Republicans receive from the mainstream media.)
The McCain connection: In 2013, after Russian President Vladimir Putin published an op-ed in The New York Times (a paper Lake frequently decries) in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, McCain — a longtime critic of Putin and an active supporter of U.S. intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition — announced that he would publish a response article in Pravda.
The paper, which Russian President Boris Yeltsin sold to a Greek company in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, refused to publish McCain’s response “because it was not aligned to the political positions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.”
Note: McCain did publish his op-ed article on Pravda.ru, which is a separate entity from the Pravda newspaper.