What in the heck were the good people of New Hampshire thinking the other night when they cast the plurality of their votes for John “The Maverick” McCain – or were they thinking at all? Isn’t it eminently clear that John McCain has staked the success of his 2008 presidential bid on the ignorance and short memories of the electorate??

The liberal media, who have long dallied with him in an on-again-off-again love affair, have endowed him with the ‘endearing’ moniker Maverick because his political cannon frequently becomes loose, lurches unfailingly toward the Right, and goes off – maiming his fellow partisans and innocent bystanders on the right-wing. These casualties of the Right, over the years, have had some other choice adjectives for this man other than ‘maverick’ – such as, perhaps, strident, unfaithful, intemperate, petulant, or foolhardy.

Let’s take an important stroll down memory lane, sketching a character portrait of this man by examining his improbable career.

The Warrior

John Sidney McCain III was born August 29^th, 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone (long before one Jimmy Carter gave away our vital strategic asset) to a U.S. Navy Admiral, who was himself the son of a U.S. Navy Admiral of the same name. Should Mr. McCain be elected President of the United States in 2008, he would the oldest person ever to assume the Office.

Given his lineage, he attended various schools as military assignments caused his family to move about frequently. Not a good student academically, he developed a quick temper and the desire to aggressively compete and to prevail – becoming a skilled boxer and wrestler in school. He graduated from the top private Episcopal High School in Alexandria, VA in 1954, and subsequently entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.

His tenure as a midshipman at the Academy was rebellious and lackluster, and gained him infamous status as an inductee to the Century Club for garnering more than 100 demerits each year he attended. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class in 1958.

He spent his first two and a half years as a commissioned Ensign at naval aviation training centers learning to fly the A-1 Skyraider while generally partying, dating “Marie the Flame of Florida,” a period in which he stated that he, “generally misused my good health and youth.” Despite narrowly escaping the crash of his plane into Corpus Christi Bay on a practice run, and sustaining a major collision with power lines over Spain, John McCain graduated from flight school in 1960 as a naval attack pilot.

After a tour of duty aboard the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and later on the USS Enterprise, which took part in the naval blockade of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he returned stateside to serve as a naval flight instructor at Mississippi’s Naval Air Station Meridian. He flew in and out of McCain Field, named after his grandfather who commanded naval forces with distinction in the WWII Pacific Theater, and by 1964 had hooked up with a beautiful model named Carol Shepp who had recently divorced one of his Annapolis classmates, marrying her in 1965 – adopting her two young children and fathering his daughter Sidney in 1966.

Always striving to live up to his paternal lineage, he grew frustrated as a flight instructor and applied for combat duty. While the conflict in Vietnam accelerated, he was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal flying A-4 Skyhawks, while at the same his father was attaining the rank of U.S. Navy Admiral, in command of all U.S. Naval Forces, Europe. The Forrestal was ordered to take part in Operation Rolling Thunder in the Vietnam Theater, flying missions against pre-selected North Vietnamese infrastructure targets. Frustrated with the targets selected, the upstart Lt. Commander McCain would later write, “In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war.”

On July 29^th, 1967, while the Forrestal operated in the Gulf of Tonkin, a rocket from an F-4 Phantom jet spontaneously misfired across the crowded carrier deck, and struck John McCain’s aircraft, rupturing his fuel tank and igniting a fire which quickly engulfed it and the armed aircraft crammed together nearby. McCain narrowly escaped by exiting his cockpit and traversing the aircraft’s protruding refueling probe before making it to the flaming carrier deck, just as a chain reaction of over-heated bombs began to explode.

The horrific Forrestal accident and ensuing fire took 24 hours to contain, and took the lives of, or injured, 194 sailors and destroyed at least 20 aircraft – taking the ship out of action. Shortly afterward in Saigon, McCain was interviewed by The New York Times stating, “It’s a difficult thing to say. But now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”

Asserting that he had never considered any other line of work, John McCain soon volunteered to join another attack squadron aboard the USS Oriskany which had suffered heavy pilot casualties in 1967 under operation Rolling Thunder. On October 26^th, after completing 22 bombing missions against North Vietnam, he was shot down by a Soviet-made SA-2 surface-to-air missile while attacking a target in central Hanoi; he parachuted into a lake and nearly drowned due to his fractured arms and leg. He was subsequently plucked from the lake by an angry mob of civilians who spat upon him and thoroughly beat him, exacerbating his injuries and giving him numerous new ones. He was sent to Hanoi’s main prison where he was summarily interrogated, tortured, and where his captors refused to give him serious medical attention; he was not expected to live.

Only when the Viet-Cong discovered, via the front page of The New York Times, that his father was a U.S. Navy Admiral, he was given some care in a hospital. After six weeks he was transferred back to prison where his fellow captives nursed him as best they could, but no one expected him to survive even a week under such conditions. In May 1968, McCain was sent into solitary confinement where he survived the next two years. In July, his father was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific which encompassed the Vietnam Theater. North Vietnamese officials offered him an early release from prison, in an attempt at a propaganda coup which would be used to dispirit his U.S. compatriots that only special privilege mattered. McCain refused his early release (enduring a subsequent 5 more years in prison) on the grounds of “first in, first out”, accepting their offer only if every man who had been captured before him was released as well.

In August, his captors stepped up their campaign of frequent torture until, after several days of continual abuse, he was forced to sign a “confession” of being a war “criminal” which was used for propaganda purposes. He states later that, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.” He refused to meet with so-called peace delegations and celebrity seekers so as not to assist the VC in their continual propaganda efforts. Late in 1969, the treatment of the POW’s improved markedly after the word had gotten out about their abysmal treatment, and soon thereafter he was transferred to the famous Hoa Loa Prison (aka. The infamous Hanoi Hilton).

After nearly five and a half years in captivity, John McCain and his fellow POW’s were finally released following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. He outwardly carries the scars from his captivity to this day as evidenced by his sometimes stiff gesticulations and the inability to raise his arms above the shoulder.

The Politician

Upon returning home with the aid of crutches, he discovered his wife Carol had survived her own ordeal – a devastating car accident in 1969 which left her with her own set of crutches, four inches shorter, and considerably heavier than the model she had been.

As he went through physical therapy for his injuries and recovered just enough to be appointed Commanding Officer of an A-7 Corsair II training squadron in Jacksonville, FL, his marriage entered troubled waters. For all they had been through, chasing his youth (and various women), the Maverick engaged in a series of extra-marital affairs. He said, “My marriage’s collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine.”

By the mid-seventies, while it was becoming clear the there was too much wreckage in his wake to continue to achieve what his fathers had in climbing the ranks to Admiral of the U.S. Navy, things started to look up for the congenitally ambitious Maverick. By this time, his Vietnam ordeal and his lineage had gained him a notable amount of nationwide celebrity and he began to strategize about how to parlay it into a political career.

He thought about running in 1976 for a seat in the U.S. House of Reps. from Florida, but upon the recommendation of Admiral James L. Holloway III, McCain became the Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate in 1977, where he quickly began to make many important connections on Capitol Hill. In 1979, while away from his wife and family he attended a military reception in Hawaii, and was smitten by an attractive blonde he met there named Cindy Hensley – who happened to be 17 years his junior. The gorgeous young teacher also just happened to be the daughter of a wealthy beer magnate from Phoenix, AZ.

People witnessed him indiscreetly, aggressively pursuing her, and by spring 1980 he abandoned his family, filing for immediate divorce from Carol, and marrying Cindy a few weeks later. Having found his golden ticket, he relocated to Arizona, where his new father-in-law put him to work in a public relations capacity where he could travel throughout the communities making political connections – and among those was banker Charles Keating, Jr.

On the lookout now for a political opportunity, the glad-handing Maverick’s opening finally came in 1982 when the congressional seat from AZ’s 1^st district was vacated. Straight away, his lovely new wife set about finding a home they could purchase in order to satisfy residency requirements for a run at the open seat in Congress. They obtained their new home, and with the help of a sizable portion of his wife’s fortune, he outspent his rivals and prevailed in a tough race from opposing state legislators, and at the same time, he beat the carpetbagger rap.

In Congress, McCain was assigned to the Committee on Interior Affairs and was responsible for sponsoring many largely unsuccessful Indian Affairs bills dealing with distribution of lands to reservations and tribal tax status. While his political proclivities were believed to be generally in line with that of Ronald Reagan’s, he began to shape his maverick image with the media when he voted against allowing President Reagan to station U.S. Marines within Beirut, a month before the horrific bombing of their barracks.

He won reelection handily in 1984, and subsequently was successful in getting the Indian Economic Development Act of 1985 passed into law. McCain further cemented his reputation for bucking his Party’s leadership when he voted in 1986 to successfully override President Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act which brought, among other things, economic sanctions down upon the government of South Africa. During this period of service in the House, Cindy gave birth to daughter Meghan, son John Sidney McCain IV, and his brother James.

In 1986, John McCain was elected to the U.S. Senate, filling the seat (but not the shoes) of the retiring, legendary Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater – aka. Mr. Conservative – widely credited for planting the seeds of, in the ashes of his 1964 defeat, the coming Reagan Revolution. McCain made alliances with some colleagues, but also tangled horns with many others. In 1989, in his strong advocacy of John Tower’s ill-fated bid to become George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, the Maverick clashed with the Moral Majority’s co-founder Paul Weyrich, who challenged Tower’s alleged heavy drinking and extra-marital affairs; this sparked what many believe to be McCain’s difficult, contemptuous relationship with the “Religious Right.” McCain wrote that Weyrich was “a pompous self-serving son of a bitch.”

In the late 1980’s the first-term senator was caught in what was dubbed the Keating Five Scandal – McCain being one of five U.S. Senators involved. Deregulated in the 1980’s, the Savings & Loan industry essentially collapsed by the end of the decade for making risky real estate investments with the banks’ deposits, and some involved, like Charles Keating, Jr., dabbled in fraud as well. Keating and his associates contributed around $112,000 to McCain’s political coffers, with an aggregate amount of $1.3 million funneled to the Five Senators in total.

By strange coincidence, the Senators held private meetings several times with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, to pressure him to help prevent the government from taking over Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. McCain participated in at least two of these many meetings. And, by sheer coincidence, the Maverick, his family and baby-sitter, took at least nine trips at Keating’s expense – sometimes aboard one of Keating’s corporate jets.

Charles Keating was eventually charged by the government in a $1.1 billion civil racketeering lawsuit, and was convicted in the early 1990’s. John McCain has successfully swept aside his unfortunate experience as a member of the Keating Five, stating, “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 it was the wrong thing to do.”

McCain’s ‘maverick’ admission to his involvement accelerated the amorous relationship he had worked with the liberal-dominated press. Ultimately, he got off easy by earning himself a reprimand of exercising “poor judgment” by the (toothless) Senate Ethics Committee. He won reelection to the Senate in 1992 by an easy margin, over-shadowing his scandals by the Maverick’s innate proclivity to “armchair quarterback” the first Gulf War under George H. W. Bush through the media.

In William J. Clinton’s first term, John McCain teamed with fellow Vietnam war-hero, Sen. John F. Kerry to push for improved relations with Vietnam. During special hearings, the maverick Senator reportedly developed “unbounded respect and admiration” for his fellow Senator from Massachusetts, the once outspoken leader of the venerable organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Through the dynamic duo’s leadership, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs eventually made an official announcement squashing the possibility that any U.S. POW or MIA could any longer remain alive against their will in Vietnam. In 1995, President Clinton, without mention of his own dodging of the Vietnam conflict, normalized diplomatic and economic relations with the Vietnamese Communists.

In 1995, the original version of the McCain-Feingold Act was introduced in Congress, and was subsequently filibustered and killed in the following year. The Maverick played a key part in getting passed the Line Item Veto Act of 1996, which was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998 as unconstitutional. In 1998, McCain proposed legislation to heavily tax the tobacco industry to fund a new health-police bureaucracy – it was defeated in the Senate. And a new version the McCain-Feingold legislation was reintroduced but was filibustered and failed – and again, it failed in 1999.

McCain ran for President in 2000 and was very bitter when he lost the Republican nomination to George W. Bush. Subsequently, he was one of a few Republicans to vote against President Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and again against them in 2003, but voted to leave the tax cuts in place in 2006 as the Primary season approached. In 2002, McCain-Feingold was reincarnated and was finally passed under the moniker Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. His cardinal legislative achievement represents no less than the largest assault on the free speech of American citizens in at least a century for barring contributions and the airing of advertisements shortly before elections take place.

Wielding his Vietnam experience, the Maverick has brow-beaten his colleagues at every opportunity to assert he is the preeminent expert on the subject. And, as such, he has spear-headed a somewhat successful political movement on Capitol Hill barring “all forms of torture” against enemy combatants, no matter the security situation – even though, he has thus far failed to define exactly what constitutes such “torture.” In light of his position, he has advocated the elimination of the enemy combatant detention facility now in Guantanamo.

During the 2004 election campaign, John McCain was repeatedly wooed to become John F. Kerry’s vice-presidential running mate. While McCain’s consideration of the repeated offer strung Mr. Kerry along for quite some time, the Maverick Senator denounced the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as being “dishonest and dishonorable” – men who actually served alongside Kerry in Vietnam (including his entire chain of command) and who asserted that he was not fit to serve as Commander-in-Chief. And, in 2004, John McCain was reelected to the U.S. Senate by his largest winning margin yet.

In 2005, McCain joined the Gang of 14 in the U.S. Senate. This so-called ‘moderate’ group of 7 Republican and 7 Democrat Senators decided to band together, and control President Bush’s nomination process for the judicial branch – mainly because of the Democrat’s constant belligerent penchant to unconstitutionally block most of the President’s nominees – and, because the Democrats were incessantly threatening, and sometimes employing, the tactic of filibustering his nominations so that the Senate never went to an open vote to give their consent for the bench.

Because the Republicans held a razor-thin majority in the Senate then, there existed the historic opportunity to simply change the procedural rules to eliminate the ability to filibuster the nomination process (which is unconstitutional), and then submit the President’s judicial nominees, including those for the U.S. Supreme Court, to have their entitled yea-or-nay, “advise and consent” vote. Because of McCain’s defection to the Gang of 14, they were successful in pushing the logjam of nominees through to a fair vote, but at the same time, purposely squandered the historic opportunity to eliminate the outrageous misuse of the filibuster for future nominations.

In recent years, Senator McCain has repeatedly teamed up with Democrat Joseph Lieberman (the 2000 Vice-Presidential running mate of one Albert Gore, Jr.) to engineer a truly ominous legislative leviathan to address the “Global Warming Crisis” scam. They have repeatedly devised a government, bureaucratic “carbon credit cap” scheme for manipulating and controlling companies and the electorate as to their energy usage and economic patterns. This legislation represents the polar opposite of free markets, solutions coming from capitalism, and individual citizens enjoying their God-given liberties and enjoying their private property rights – that is, the fruits of their own labor.

But the biggest threat to America and her sovereignty comes from a most abominable bill cosponsored by McCain and liberal legend, Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy – euphemistically called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act. This legislative chimera was the most disgusting sell-out of American sovereignty the People had ever seen in their lifetime, and subsequently, over the last few years, we have told Washington DC we do not want his de facto amnesty bill to reward illegal alien insurgents who continue to infiltrate our homeland by the millions.

On the campaign trail for the 2008 Presidency, this is where John McCain continues to spew his biggest lies. This legislation he has been pushing very hard for IS AMNESTY for illegal aliens. There’s a reason he has not been able to revive his vaunted mantra from his 2000 Presidential campaign – The “Straight Talk” Express. In 2008, he’s dropped most of the ‘straight talk’ altogether.

I remember vividly, when the Maverick recently pleaded with his colleagues, from the well of the U.S. Senate, that if they could not see his eminent wisdom in giving Z-Visa “citizens” (phony citizens manufactured by handing out a special, new z-visa document to illegal aliens, thus magically making them ‘legal’ residents) Social Security benefits along with scads of other goodies and citizens’ benefits, that his misguided colleagues were tantamount to telling these illegal aliens that they must “ride in the back of the bus.” How utterly outrageous a defilement is it to compare illegal aliens to those who struggled for their rightful Civil Rights?

Mr. McCain has had a long political career and has made many enemies along the way, by using his military experience as a bludgeon against those in his way, by employing his irascible habits of profanity and contempt often against his natural allies, and now he’s even abandoned his famous “straight talk.” What’s left? Not a man who wants to DO Something in particular for the good of the American People, but rather, someone who lost his way in his rebellious attempt to BE Something – to keep the faith of his fathers, by walking in their footsteps, to get that one military grade his father and grandfather never made – to be Commander in Chief!

Presidential Character

The ancient Greeks had a pretty good model for the character needed in a leader, which is summarized by the following four areas of his character: (1) Fortitude (courage, strength..), (2) Temperance (self-discipline, control..), (3) Prudence (judgment, wisdom..), and (4) Justice (goodness, fairness..).

The best leaders, our best Presidents had all four categories of their characters covered and in balance; George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each come to mind and had these characteristics in spades.

Mr. McCain, you’ve got the first-area requirement nailed, and we congratulate you for your courage under fire, for your military fortitude, and even respect you for what we may call your ‘maverickness.’ But, certainly, satisfying merely one of four categories does not make someone Presidential material – at a critical time in our nation’s history when we need great and careful leadership.

Sorry – this is Straight Talk  - We can and must find a Republican candidate better than John S. McCain III.

-ThoughtRogue

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