John McCain, A Hero? NO!

Nirek, thanks so much for this post. Quite a while back, a friend of mine made what I thought was a very astute observation about John McCain. He said that even though McCain had been out of that Vietnamese prison camp for many years — “mentally, he’s still in the ‘tiger cage.'”

Meaning that he was in a sort of chronic, angry, fearful, defensive crouch in his own mind. Maybe that’s one reason someone who seems to have the same emotional qualities — Sarah Palin — appealed to him?

Nirek, I think one of the best exposes of McCain was the Rolling Stone article back in 2008 when he was running for President, titled, “Make-Believe Maverick”.

McCain’s image of a maverick, which he famously denied he ever represented himself to be in his last re-election campaign because Repub voters wanted a conformist, was so phony.

The truth is that McCain is and always has been an opportunist and that trait was camouflaged with the phony title of “Maverick”. Yes, of course his positions weren’t always lock step with core Republicans, when he thought it was to his advantage to promote himself (he always dreamed he would become President…maybe it’s more accurate to say he always felt entitled to be President).

As we’ve seen before, during and since McCain ran for President, his “principled” stands on issues are easily thrown away and even denied they ever existed. One thing he has always been consistent on is wanting to kill people in foreign countries and kill members of our military at any and every opportunity. He is not a hero in my eyes, he is a traitor to our military who doesn’t care one bit about their lives.

Here are a couple of tidbits from the RS article:

Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

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In his current campaign [2008], however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as “agents of intolerance,” promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove’s base. And he has engaged in a “practice of politics” so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain’s campaign ads go “too far” and fail the “truth test.”

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In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing.

Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described “daredevil clowning” plunged much of the area into a blackout.

That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia.

Preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot’s dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach. McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs “cooked off,” blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier’s 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.

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Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them.

Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/make-believe-maverick-20081016

This RS article is mindblowing in revealing who McCain really is.

How anyone can attribute principles to this self-centered, callous, conscience-less man is beyond me.