JOHN MCCAIN - A GREAT MAN
John Sidney McCain III (born August 29, 1936) is the senior United States Senator from Arizona, the presumptive Republican Party nominee in the 2008 presidential election, an old man, and a great man.
In the Republican Party, there are two kinds of great men: those that support the Iraq War but were too cowardly to fight in a war when they had the chance, and, much less common, those that support the Iraq War and did fight in other wars when they had the chance. McCain is the latter kind of great men.
During the Vietnam War, McCain became a naval aviator. In a bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1967, he was shot down and badly injured. He endured five and a half years as a prisoner of war, including periods of torture, before he was released following the Paris Peace Accords in 1973.
In 1982, McCain was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and in 1986, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. During his years in the Senate, McCain has essentially been an unthinking, run-of-the-mill right-winger. He managed to establish a reputation, however, as a "maverick" who often "defied orthodoxy." That this is true is testament to the high incidence of great men in the media, an occupation generally considered to have among the highest of GMPRs (great man prevalence rate).
In the late 1980's, McCain became one of the "Keating Five." Some have noted that this sounds like a band. And to the extent that taking payoffs from corrupt savings and loans officials, passing legislation that deregulated the industry and destroyed thousands of lives, and intervening in the investigation of said corrupt savings and loan officials is like playing music, then, yes, they were a band. A very good one.
In order to salvage his career, McCain recreated himself as a campaign-finance reformer. Because of a defect in the media, McCain succeeded. In 2002, the largely useless McCain-Feingold Act was passed.
McCain ran for the Republican nomination in the 2000 presidential election, but was defeated by another great man, George W. Bush. In the 2008 presidential cycle, McCain was joined in the race by a lazy great man, a Mormon great man, a evangelical great man, a libertarian former gynecologist great man and a great man named Giuliani. After the Mormon great man dropped out in February of 2008, McCain became the presumptive nominee.
Early life and military career
Family background and early education
McCain was born on August 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Air Base in the Panama Canal Zone, then controlled by the United States. Both his father and grandfather were United States Navy admirals, and were in fact the first father-son pair each to achieve four-star admiral rank. Oddly, there is no similar ranking for the level of great men that one has reached. If there were such a system, and if it were, similarly, based on a possible total of five, McCain would be said to have achieved a four-great man rank.
Because McCain was born outside the United States, some mentally challenged right-wing bloggers (or, as they are known, “right-wing bloggers”) have suggested that McCain is therefore not eligible to be president. Unfortunately, they are wrong. The constitution requires only that the president be a "natural born citizen," which the First Congress said included "the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or outside the limits of the United States." Therefore, John McCain is, indeed, eligible to save the United States by becoming its president.
Naval training, early assignments, first marriage and children
Like his father and grandfather, McCain enrolled in the United States Naval Academy. There, he earned over 100 demerits. His reaction was that it was "bullshit."
But it was in his off-base activities that McCain truly excelled. According to one classmate, "being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck." It is unclear what being with McCain during his presidency would be like for the nation. Unfortunately, America has no direct experience from which to draw with a president who was a temperamental son of a distinguished military man and who in college was a temperamental great man who liked to party. What could possibly be so dangerous about that?
McCain graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958, ranked 894th out of 899. As historians have noted, there were five people in his class who were actually bigger great men than McCain, but none of them are running for president.
McCain, commissioned an ensign, spent two and a half years training as a naval aviator in Pensacola. There he earned a reputation as a party man, drove a Corvette, dated an exotic dancer named "Marie the Flame of Florida," and, as he would later say, "generally misused my good health and youth." But at least when it came to flying, he took his responsibilities seriously.
Just kidding. He didn't care about those either -- he was a below average flyer, and couldn't be bothered to read his aviation manuals. But, as many noted partying experts have asked, what good could possibly come of reading manuals? It's not like one might have a situation in which one's plane would quit while landing and crash into Corpus Christi Bay, or be flying too low in Spain and take out some power lines, or crash while en route to Philadelphia for an Army/Navy football game.
Vietnam operations
In December 1966, McCain was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, which, in 1967 was assigned to join Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. On October 26, 1967, McCain began his political career by being shot down. He was then held prisoner by the North Vietnamese for seven years. During this time, McCain was also tortured. Such barbaric treatment gave McCain a unique insight into the evil of torture. And though McCain's war injuries left him with limited mobility in his arms, he was still able to pat himself on his back throughout his Senate career for his opposition to the practice. When the Iraq War began, and reports began to appear that the United States has used torture, including waterboarding, on detainees, McCain spoke out.
But in February of 2007, even though he had become the presumptive GOP nominee for president, McCain had still not secured the enthusiastic support of right-wing goons and thugs whose sexual inadequacy has manifested in an extreme love of torture. This group is also sometimes referred to as "The Republican Party."
Therefore, when an Intelligence Authorization Bill came to the Senate floor that would require the intelligence community to abide by the same standards contained in the Army Field Manual, which bans waterboarding, McCain was faced with a choice: make a principled stand consistent with his avowed opposition to torture, or cowardly choose to abandon his principles and suck-up to the right-wing goons and thugs who sexual inadequacy has manifested in an extreme love of torture. McCain chose the latter.
As many whose views of foreign policy are not influenced by sexual inadequacy have noted, aside from the moral reason to not engage in torture, another is the reasonable conclusion that making practices like waterboarding legal also makes it much more likely that other countries will engage in the same practices on American prisoners of war. McCain's son Jimmy is, in fact, in the Marine Corps. On February 14th, 2007, Jimmy returned from Iraq, meaning that McCain's son is now safe from the increased danger of being tortured that McCain's cowardice has placed other U.S. troops under.
Return to United States
After returning to the U.S., McCain was reunited with his wife Carol, who, in a 1969 car accident, had suffered near-death injuries of her own. This had left her four inches shorter and substantially heavier. While stationed at Jacksonville, Florida, McCain began to have extramarital affairs. As he later noted, "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam..." That would distinguish it from his political career.
In 1979, while attending a military reception in Hawaii, McCain met and fell in love with a teacher from Phoenix named Cindy Lou Hensley, 17 years his junior, and the daughter of a wealthy Anheuser-Busch distributor. It is unclear whether the latter detail had any influence over McCain, but the ability to easily secure a keg of Bud -- the King of Beers, brewed by an original all natural process using the choicest hops, rice and best barley malt -- on short notice and at wholesale prices could possibly have seemed like an added enticement to someone who liked to party as much as McCain.
McCain divorced his wife Carol in 1980. McCain and Hensley were married that same year. Unfortunately, the wedding came too early to feature Bud Light, which was introduced in 1982, and is brewed with the finest ingredients for a refreshingly smooth taste.
McCain's children were not happy about the wedding and did not attend, though maybe that was because they do not like the choicest hops and best barley malt. If they feel they are too good for such things, then they do not deserve the King of Beers.
Political career
U.S. Congressman
Now living in Phoenix, McCain set about finding work. In what would later turn out to be good practice for a senate career spent working wealthy players like corrupt savings and loan felon Charles Keating for favors, McCain got a job with his father-in-law. His title was Vice President of Public Relations, probably because it sounded more important than "Goodwill Ambeersador." Here, McCain was tasked with the tough job of schmoozing business people. It was difficult, grueling work, the sort of job that often meant spending six, or even seven hours a day at the grindstone. But it was also the sort of job McCain was uniquely qualified for.
In 1982, a seat came open in Arizona's 1st congressional district. McCain ran, and, after outspending his opponents courtesy of a $167,000 loan his wife made to the campaign, McCain eked out a win.
U.S. Senator
After Barry Goldwater retired in 1986, McCain ran for and won Goldwater's Senate seat. Once in the Senate, McCain soon got into a quarrel with Paul Weyrich. As co-founder of the Moral Majority, Weyrich was a prominent leader of the religious right, and was angry over McCain's defense of President George H. W. Bush's nominee for Secretary of Defense, John Tower, whom the religious right opposed over allegations of heavy drinking and extramarital affairs.
During this time, and up until his run for the presidency, McCain was often at odds with the religious right. Though, as with the issue of torture, the bravery McCain showed in Vietnam disappeared when he was forced to choose between maintaining his principles or sucking up to the worst people in the country.
Keating Five
In the late 1980's McCain finally distinguished himself in the Senate with the help of a man named Charles Keating. The Lincoln Savings and Loan, headed by Keating, had become embroiled in scandal and federal regulators were looking to shut it down and investigate. Keating, who had known McCain since the latter's days as a layabout schmoozer for his father-in-law the Vice President of Public Relations for the Phoenix Budweiser distributor, began looking for a way to get the government to drop the investigation.
Between 1982 and 1987, Keating had given McCain $112,000. Of course, it is possible that Keating had given McCain this money out of the goodness of his heart with no strings attached, simply out of a heartfelt love of the democratic process. It is also possible that R. Kelly just has a healthy interest in helping 16 year-old girls negotiate the rocky shoals of late adolescence.
Directly after two meetings with Keating, McCain called Edwin J. Gray, the chief of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which was investigating Keating, and requested that Gray ease off the investigation. Gray testified that four other Senators, all of whom were recipients of political donations from Keating, had also contacted him with the same request. These became known as the "Keating Five."
The saddest part of the entire situation, even more sad than the 21,000 mostly elderly people who had their entire life savings completely wiped out, was that it brought the appearance of conflict upon Senator McCain. As McCain said, "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence."
And what a terrible impression that can be. Almost as terrible as working your ass off your entire life, little by little putting enough money away for retirement, and then right before retirement finding out your life savings has been robbed from you and instead of working to try to get your money back, your own senator is busy trying to quash the investigation.
On the positive side, the physical activity and social contact that accompany many minimum wage jobs can be good for seniors. The ones who are still ambulatory, anyway.
A "maverick" senator
Rightly sensing that he had disgraced himself in the Keating Five scandal and that this would hinder his chances to save the country as a hotheaded, dangerously unstable, pandering, angry, very old president, McCain set out to launder his reputation. Since the Keating Five scandal had shown him to be a financially sleazy insider, the way McCain chose to rehabilitate himself was campaign finance.
And so, in 1994, McCain teamed up with Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold to introduce the McCain-Feingold Act, a bill that would ostensibly diminish the influence of money in politics by placing limits on so-called "soft money" donations by corporations, union and other institutions. The bill was passed in 2002 and took effect in 2003.
The effort paid off for McCain, and in just a few years the press corps, whose short-term memory falls somewhere between that of a household cat and the Rhesus Macaque monkey (Macaca mulatta), native to Afghanistan, northern India, and southern China, hailed McCain as a good government and campaign finance reformer.
How effective was the act in reducing the influence of money in politics? The answer can be found in a simple experiment that anybody can do. Try it yourself: just say the following phrase out loud: "Hey money, I want you to stop influencing politics!" There, you have now had more influence in diminishing the influence of money in politics than the "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, McCain–Feingold Act, Pub.L. 107-155, 116 Stat. 81, enacted 2002-03-27)."
A "great" senator
Far from actually being a "maverick," the one word that would accurately describe his time in public life is: "great man." That McCain was able to successfully make himself be thought of as a "maverick" says as much about the press as it does about McCain. That is, one cannot understand how McCain did this without also understanding the delicate psychology of the Washington D. C. press corps.
Most Washington journalists have a deeply internalized sense of self-loathing. They see themselves as cowardly, flaccid, ineffectual, impotent wimps. In this, they're not entirely wrong. They have always secretly admired the asshole jocks who used to push them around in high school. The journalists would console themselves with the soothing affirmation that the assholes were not as smart as they were. They were right, of course, but still, deep down the journalists secretly admired the assholes.
Along comes John McCain -- a great man, but a great man who is nice to them, a great man who comes to back of the plane and jokes around with them and doesn't make them feel unmanly. Why, sometimes, it seemed as if McCain really liked them. A few years of this, and suddenly McCain's not a temperamental, dangerously unstable asshole, he's a "maverick."
But the self-esteem issues of the weakling press notwithstanding, McCain is, in fact, a great man. A great man who wants to be the President of the United States. As a great senator, he the sort of guy who says things like:
• "Only an asshole would put a budget together like this!" (to New Mexico Republican Pete Dominici)
• "I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" (to Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley)
• "Fuck you. I know more about this than anybody in the room." (To Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn)
This is why Senator Dominici said in 2000 that "I decided I didn't want this guy anywhere near a trigger." It is presumed by this he meant the nuclear trigger.
McCain is also the sort of guy who would tell the following joke:
Q: Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
A: Her father is Janet Reno.
This is the sort of humor assholes find funny. When he told the joke, Chelsea Clinton was seventeen years old. Some say when you open an attack like this on the looks of someone who did not ask to be thrust into the public eye, you invite similar attacks in your own direction.
In speaking about whether he had ever witnessed McCain's notorious temper problem, former Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum said, "I don't know anybody in the Senate who hasn't. Everybody has their McCain story."
And if America elects this temperamental, dangerously unstable, angry old asshole, America will have its own McCain story too.
2000 presidential campaign
In the summer of 1999, McCain came to the conclusion that his power to save the country was too limited in the Senate. So on September 27, 1999 in Nashua, New Hampshire, McCain formally announced he was running for the presidency. The leader in fundraising, establishment party support, and expectations was another temperamental great son of a military man, Texas Governor George W. Bush.
McCain decided to skip Iowa and, on the advice his political consultant, a great man named Mike Murphy, instead went straight to New Hampshire. He traveled in a bus called "The Straight Talk Express." This is presumably because his great consultant Murphy decided that this was a better name than the "Greatness Limited," or the "Awesome Mobile."
On February 1, 2000, McCain won the primary with 49 percent of the vote to Bush's 30 percent. Bush was in trouble and the upcoming South Carolina primary would be crucial.
The fight between Bush and McCain in South Carolina has become known as one of the nastiest and dirties fights in American electoral history. This is especially noteworthy given the fact that, by then, the Republican Party had already established itself as a particularly sleazy institution. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, had, in fact, won by exploiting the racist "southern strategy," begun by Richard Nixon, and built upon by Ronald Reagan and political strategist Lee Atwater, currently in hell.
Traditionally, the racist strategy was used against Democrats. The South Carolina primary was one of the few times it was used for intra-party purposes.
Days before voting, an anonymous group began a semi-underground smear campaign against McCain. Using push polls, flyers, and emails, the group claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. McCain does, in fact, have a dark-skinned daughter, Bridget. She was adopted from Bangladesh. (Presumably McCain would be angry if someone were to make jokes about Bridget's looks or ponder whether Bridget's father had been Janet Reno, but consistency is rarely something dangerously unstable great men are accused of.)
This was a classic use of the GOP's "southern strategy." The Bush campaign made what is known as a "big show" in denying any connection with these attacks, and said he would fire anybody who ran defamatory push polls. As the country later found out, Bush often says he will fire any aides found to be involved in wrongdoing. This is the sort of thing that passes for a joke in Deke House.
Of those who spread the rumors, McCain said "I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those." If by "those" he means people who try to cynically exploit racism for political gain, it appears that "people like those" will have to make room for one more asshole. Before the South Carolina race, McCain had said the Confederate flag was "very offensive." But then, when he needed the votes of the racist thugs and goons there, McCain rethought his position, and came to the conclusion that the flag was a "symbol of heritage."
Bush was able to out pander McCain among the racists and won the South Carolina primary. McCain withdrew from the race on March 9, 2000. McCain would, however, learn a valuable lesson about pandering to right-wing religious bigots: do it early, and do it completely.
2001–2008
McCain spent the years of the first and second Bush administrations making self-congratulatory shows of "independence" from the Republican party and cultivating the weakling press to keep up his image as a "maverick." It was in these years that McCain laid the groundwork for what would be the classic McCain pattern: speak out against bad people when it doesn't matter, cowardly cave in when it does matter.
Most of the manifestations of McCain's "maverick" streak were confined to domestic policy. Like when he voted against the first of Bush's tax cuts, but later voted to extend them and then said if elected president he would make them permanent. But on foreign policy, McCain has rarely done anything but parrot his fellow temperamental great son of a military man, President Bush.
McCain considers "national security" to be one his strengths. Given the fact that he has yet to be right about any single fact regarding Iraq when it counted, this should tell you something about his prowess in domestic matters. For instance, McCain stated unequivocally that Iraq had substantial weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America." McCain also claimed that U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people.
In April of 2007, after claiming that people were "not getting the full picture" of what was going on in Iraq, McCain made a stroll through an Baghdad market. He said there “are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today.” He did not mention that he was accompanied by one-hundred soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships.
Later that same month, McCain was asked about possible military action against Iran. His response was to sing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the melody of the Beach Boys' song "Barbara Ann." Though this was widely criticized at the time, it should be noted, however, that deciding foreign policy based on punning lyrics to Beach Boys songs could not, at least, result in a worse situation than the one the United States finds itself in today.
2008 presidential campaign
McCain announced he was seeking the 2008 Presidential nomination of the Republican Party on the February 28, 2007. He chose a venue that was perfectly suitable to his seriousness as a leader: the Late Show With David Letterman.
Should McCain win, he would be the oldest person ever to assume the Presidency at the initial ascension to office, being 72 years old and surpassing Ronald Reagan, who was 69 years old. Reagan was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and there were questions of whether the disease had begun during his presidency. Though the diseases associated with old age are obviously relevant to McCain's candidacy, he is shielded somewhat from such attacks due to the fact that McCain has been known to be dangerously unstable his entire life.
With no clear front-runner in the race, McCain won the New Hampshire primary on January 8, 2008. He followed this with victories in South Carolina and Florida, after which he became the front-runner and presumptive nominee. The fact that McCain, an unstable, angry old asshole, would find himself coasting to the nomination says much about the rest of the field he was facing. His two main rivals were Mitt Romney, a comically soulless toady whose religion, Mormonism, was once thought to be his weakness but turned out to be the only consistent fact about him, and Rudy Giuliani, who is, according to scientific studies, the most dangerous and insane man ever to run for president.
In the course of winning the nomination and attempting to unite the Republican Party around him, McCain, in accordance with the McCain pattern, has reversed himself on almost every issue on which his reputation as a "maverick" depended.
Though he once called religious bigots like Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," he now eagerly gets on his knees to fellate them to completion ask for their support. Though he once self-congratulatorily denounced the practice of state-sanctioned torture, he voted against making it explicitly illegal for C.I.A. interrogators. Though he once supported a common-sense immigration reform bill co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy, when asked during a Republican debate in Los Angeles whether he would vote for his own bill, McCain said, "No, I would not." Though he was once Episcopalian, McCain now identifies himself as a Baptist. Fittingly, McCain now supports the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools.
On February 20, 2008, The New York Times reported an affair that McCain had eight years ago with a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman, who looks strangely like McCain's bizarre-looking wife, Cindy.
Though the media focused primarily on the sex between the then 61-year old McCain and the 33 year-old Iseman, which, really, nobody wants to think about too much, the bigger issue was the favors McCain did for his lobbyist girlfriend. McCain sent two letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of one of Iseman's clients. The intercession was considered so egregious by the FCC chairman that he rebuked McCain for it.
Predictably, the response of McCain wasn't to come clean about the affair and the sleazy intervention, or even a pledge to stick to more traditional favors and gifts for his girlfriends, like fancy chocolates or jewelry, or a bath with rose petals, or just a hand-written "coupon" for a night in together. That can be fun. But instead, McCain attacked the Times and immediately used the entire episode as a fundraising opportunity in an email sent out to his gullible supporters.
In short, if McCain does not win the presidency, it will not be because he failed to show the requisite cowardice in ingratiating himself to the goonish and thuggish base of the Republican party. His reputation among the press as a "maverick" will, however, stand forever.
