People tell me I should not criticize him right now.

I do think some people are behaving in bad taste. But I do not think I am prohibited from making sober remarks at a moment when so many Americans, and the opinion molders who tell them what to think, are getting ludicrously carried away.

The phenomenon we are witnessing is so Orwellian that I can't resist exploring it. I am less concerned with criticizing McCain — there will be ample time for that — than I am with trying to understand the regime under which we live, and the media lackeys that glorify it.

The tributes to McCain from the major newspapers are so over the top that there's something more going on here than the perfunctory respect the media shows for most deceased politicians.

They will not be speaking this way about Pat Buchanan — a real maverick, who was the first conservative I ever saw who broke with both parties (that's what a maverick does) to point out that the sanctions on Iraq were creating a humanitarian catastrophe that no moral person could support (that's what an actual conservative says).

As if to show that she has every Establishment ritual already down to a science, even democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to say this:

John McCain's legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.

As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy.

He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.

"But she had to say something!" some say.

She had to say "an unparalleled example of human decency and American service"?

McCain's bellicosity in foreign policy knew no bounds. A discussion of all the interventions he favored — every one of which would have intensified the problems it was allegedly to solve — would take all week.

To a conservative movement that knows nothing of its history, this makes McCain a great conservative statesman.

And to the American Establishment, bellicosity is not and has never been a deal breaker.

McCain's preferred foreign policy has yielded death, displacement, and regional chaos on a massive scale, not to mention a huge shot in the arm to the very Islamic radicalism he assured us he was fighting against.

(McCain's insistence on being involved in every Middle East conflict under the sun made him some hideous bedfellows, I might add, as when he met with members of the Northern Storm Brigade, which had handed American journalist Steven Sotloff over to ISIS for $25,000.)

We are to believe that McCain was a "maverick."

This is because from time to time he joined forces with the Democrats, the left-wing side of the Establishment, in order to support a measure that just happened to win him media applause.