more info on senator mccain

Q: Back in December the GOP candidates were asked at a group debate to name their favorite philosophers. George W. Bush said Jesus Christ; John McCain said Teddy Roosevelt. Which has been, in his behavior since, more true to his philosopher?

A: TR is no doubt spinning in his grave.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps to understand John Sidney McCain III, we must start at the (practical) beginning.

He was known among many of his Vietnam flight buddies as "Ace" McCain. This title was not bestowed because he destroyed five enemy aircraft. On the contrary: It was five on our side — in fact, five of his own. Since throwing his hat into the presidential ring, the fact that McCain was graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy nearly at the bottom of his class has not been much publicized. Still less has been his reckless, incompetent flying.

It wasn’t long after arriving in Pensacola that McCain racked up the first of his five crashes, beginning in 1958, on his way to becoming a "reverse ace." As told by McCain biographer Robert Timberg, "McCain was practicing landings; his engine quit and he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay. Knocked unconscious by the impact, he came to as the plane settled to the bottom." There was, however, no engine failure with the aircraft. According to one of McCain’s former flight instructors, "The engine was removed from the aircraft that afternoon, mounted on a test stand and a new propeller installed. [It] was flushed with fresh water and started. It ran just fine. So the theory of engine failure was proven false." The instructor added that McCain was "positively one of the weakest students to pass our way, and received consistently poor marks and a number of Dangerous Down grades assigned by more than one instructor. He had no real ability and was clearly out of his element in an airplane, and way over his head even as a junior naval officer."

The second of McCain’s crashes occurred while he was deployed in the Mediterranean. "Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula," reports Timberg, "he took out some power lines which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral."


Crash three occurred when McCain was returning from flying a trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game. According to Timberg, McCain radioed, "I’ve got a flameout." He went through the standard relight procedures three times. At one thousand feet, he ejected, landing on the deserted beach moments before the plane slammed into a clump of trees."

Despite all this, by 1967, McCain was somehow deemed ready for battle and assigned to the USS Forrestal as an A-4 Skyhawk pilot. While seated in the cockpit of his aircraft waiting for takeoff, a freak accident occurred when a rocket slammed into the exterior fuel tank of McCain’s plane. Miraculously, McCain escaped from the burning aircraft, but dozens of his shipmates were killed and injured in the explosions that followed.

McCain’s final downing came just three months later when his A-4 was hit by antiaircraft artillery over Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi, North Vietnam. McCain spent the next five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war and, upon return to the United States in 1973, like the other returning POWs, McCain became an instant hero. The POWs had been treated abominably, yet stood up to their torturers and were deserving of the accolades they received. But some questioned the number and types of medals bestowed upon "Ace" McCain, the son of the admiral commanding in the Pacific as well as the grandson of another admiral.

"McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat," explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs — the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon. "Since McCain got 28 medals," Bell continues, "that equals out to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat. There were infantry guys — grunts on the ground — who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I’m sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison. The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down."

Why all of the above matters is that the Arizona senator is purporting to be running a campaign based not primarily upon issues but upon "biography" and "character." That is certainly the core of his appeal to so-called independents and Democrat crossovers. Yet the truth is that his biography is exaggerated at best. The appellation "war hero" should be an embarrassment to him, and certainly an insult to genuine war heroes like, well, Bob Dole and George Bush the Elder, whose exploits exceeded by quite a bit mishaps stemming from not being sure which end of the cockpit to face. And if McCain possessed the level of character he claims, he would be embarrassed.

Far from it. He revels in his "war hero" image; wallows in it, really. So much so that he ridicules Bush the Younger's National Guard service and GHWB's alleged string-pulling to get it for him even though Sailor would have been drummed out of the Navy for all his foul-ups were his sire and grandsire not amongst the top brass.

The effect of that seems to have been to develop within McCain an entitlement mentality. One that has grown a pace with his political ambitions. Only difference is, now his elders aren't around to clean up his messes for him.

McCain points to his eighteen years in Congress as the kind of experience needed to run the country as President. Yet the bulk of that time he has simply taken up space. He has no noteworthy legislative achievements to his name. The closest thing he has attained to a reputation is for being remarkably arrogant and ill-tempered with colleagues, to the point of blithering, profanity-laced rages against any who don't see things the way he does. Which is part & parcel of why so few GOP members in either house have endorsed him.

McCain, in a belated effort to reach out to the Republican base he's been figuratively kneeing in the collective groin in recent months, points to his career voting record as proof that he's a "Reagan Republican." Which is a little like Krusty the Clown claiming Fred Rogers as his professional mentor.

Through about 1996 "Sailor's" claim is true. Since then his record has moved considerably leftward - again, concurrent with his national political ambitions.

And now? He favors evisceration of the First Amendment via another spasm of so-called campaign finance reform. He opposes real Medicare reform and supports greater spending on it instead. He supports the so-called Patient's Bill of Rights, which would be a boon to trial lawyers. He was a big backer of the shakedown of Big Tobacco and still favors ratcheting up cigarette taxes. He opposes "meaningful" tax cuts and uses leftish class warfare rhetoric to criticize Governor Bush's rather modest proposal. He is now squishy on abortion, as evidenced by his answer to the hypothetical question of a pregnant daughter that "it would be her decision." And he was one of the few enthusiastic Republican backers of Bill Clinton's aggression against Yugoslavia a year ago.

Is that "growing in office"? Has he "changed his mind," or "gained a broader perspective"? If so, fine; let him say so. And he was, as long as it was helping him hijack a few early GOP primaries. Now come the serious contests, most of them Republican-only, and overnight he's a born-again Reaganite. Hardly the way to build a "new coalition."

What's more, it's difficult to take even his dogged, passionate stumping for campaign finance reform very seriously, if only because it was his own dalliance with Charles Keating that almost destroyed his political career. Was a reformer born that day, the scales fallen from his eyes? Or did he figure he had to sell out in order to survive, and picked the issue most likely to curry the favor of the Beltway press?

In any case, his hypocrisy on his core issue continues to this day. Really, how much credibility does any man have to claim to be an "outsider" when he is the Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in his day job? How much credibility does he have when the "special interests" of which he claims to be the nemesis are big contributors to his campaign, and lend him corporate jets to whisk him around the country? How much of a "reformer" is he when he violates federal spending limits in state after state and rolls over some $2 million in cash left over from his last Senate re-election warchest - both actions he endless and sanctimoniously condemns in others?

He's only playing by the rules? But if he seeks to tighten those rules, shouldn't he live by his higher standard to set a "good example"?

Still, phonies and hypocrites in politics are a dime a dozen.

And then "Ace" McCain went to Virginia Beach.

And all hell broke loose.

more info at................

http://home.comcast.net/~jimsondergeld/McCainiatheMan.html