Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., opened his heart to deliver an emotional tribute to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — telling Newsmax TV his longtime friend and onetime colleague on Capitol Hill is a "principled, heroic, patriotic, compassionate" man who is now in the fight of his life against brain cancer and may well beat it.
"He's a realist, so he knows that he's got a serious battle on his hands, but you know he's faced great challenges beforel; his will is driving him forward," Lieberman told host Bill Tucker and Nan Hayworth on Monday's "Newsmax Now."
"He's got as good treatment as you could find anywhere in the country. So we're all praying for him and he's doing everything he can do to make sure he's with us for a long time to come."
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Lieberman, a former Democrat who served in the Senate from 1989 to 2013 and was chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he considers his relationship with the 81-year-old "one of the blessings of my life."
"This is an extraordinary individual – principled, heroic, patriotic, compassionate," Lieberman said. "I mean, I don't mean to make the man into a saint, he's not a saint. He'd be the first person to tell you that. John doesn't like too much praise.
"I've been with him where people say, 'What a war hero! What an honor to meet you!' He said, I don't know what kind of war hero I was, all I did was fly my plane into a missile. That's McCain.
"He has always been a great representative of America because he represents our values – and you know, devoted to the American military, loves our troops."
Lieberman told Tucker and Hayworth that McCain — a Navy pilot who spent six years as a prisoner of war under the North Vietnamese and was awarded a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Flying Cross — has always been committed to American values, including freedom and human rights.
"One time we were in Myanmar — Burma — and we were meeting the great leader Aung San Suu Kyi and she brought in three young men, probably in their 20s," Lieberman recalled. "They looked awful. They were beaten, bruised, they had just been let go from jail.
"They were political prisoners because they had been opposing the regime and when she introduced them to John McCain, they were just startled because John had made a statement on their behalf while they were in jail.
"He had heard about them somehow, and they said it sustained them. It kept them through all the brutality that they faced."
Lieberman said when he exited the Senate in 2013, McCain "said to me, 'You know you and I have had a chance to go to places that billionaires couldn't go to.' I said, 'Yeah, most of them were battlefields, John! And maybe they wouldn't want to go!'"
Lieberman said he spoke with the six-term senator Monday, days after he was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for treatment of a viral infection, a side effect from his ongoing cancer therapy for an aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma.
"He's doing better . . . the treatment for this cancer lowers your immune system, so he got a viral infection, and he was really uncomfortable last week, but he bounced back now,'' he said.
McCain has returned to Arizona to recuperate and will miss voting on the tax reform bill this week.
"I'm so glad he's in Arizona," Lieberman said. "They don't need his vote, people know that he would have voted for the tax cut.
"You know the problem with John? You leave him in Washington, he's going to want to get out of bed and go to vote. And it's not a good idea for him, so better that he's out in his beloved Arizona.
"We've had a lot of good times together and, with God's help, we'll have a lot more, too."
McCain fired off a tweet Monday, vowing to return to Capitol Hill.
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