The web site for Senator John McCain’s political action committee (PAC) has a shaded block on the right side of the screen suggesting that you make a donation in memory of the 19 firefighters that were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire June 30:
In memory of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Join John McCain in honoring their memory by making a donation.
It does not say how or to whom the donation should be made, but the sole purpose of the PAC is to solicit donations for Senator McCain and other politicians.
Below the quoted text are icons for the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, Prescott Firefighter’s Charities, and 100 Club of Arizona. If you click on the icons you will visit those sites where it is possible to donate money to those organizations.
In the same shaded block, below the text and the icons, are fields for entering your email address and zip code. If you do that it takes you to the Senator McCain PAC donation page, asking you to make a “generous donation” so that “Country First PAC will be able to financially help like-minded candidates across the country as they run for elected office”.
Or, if you click on the Donate button at the top-right of the screen you are taken to the same Country First donation page to give money to politicians.
This is at best, confusing. Invoking the memory of the 19 dead firefighters and locating the text in the same shaded block as a link to donate to the Senator’s PAC is a bait and switch tactic. Conflating charity-type donations with requests to assist a politician is an insult to the legacy of those firefighters.
If the Senator would like to encourage donations to help the surviving families of the Granite Mountain 19, he should do it in a way that could not be confused with his requests for money for his political action committee.
Below is a screen grab from Senator McCain’s PAC web site. Click on it to see a larger version.
As usual, if you’d like to comment on this article, keep it nonpartisan.
