Unfit for Service

While we all listen to McCain ratchet up the collective testerone level on the issue of Georgia, I think it’s a good time to remind people of the nasty side of this man who wants the power to make war.

This article from April apparently caused a bit of a stir in the McCain camp when it first ran. They were actually afraid it might catch on in the media and cause them trouble. This is perhaps the first time they under-estimated the loyalty of their media base.

I’ll just give you the highlights, which begin with an accounting of the one incident that has been publicized, a 1992 encounter with fellow Republican Charles Grassley:

It is unclear precisely what issue set off McCain that day. But at some point, he mocked Grassley to his face and used a profanity to describe him. Grassley stood and, according to two participants at the meeting, told McCain, "I don't have to take this. I think you should apologize."

McCain refused and stood to face Grassley. "There was some shouting and shoving between them, but no punches," recalls a spectator, who said that Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey helped break up the altercation.

Wow. No punches. I guess that makes it okay. A second Republican weighs in:

Former senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, expresses worries about McCain: "His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him."

A spokesman for McCain's campaign said he would be unavailable for an interview on the subject of his temper. But over the years, no one has written more intimately about McCain's outbursts than McCain himself. "My temper has often been both a matter of public speculation and personal concern," he wrote in a 2002 memoir. "I have a temper, to state the obvious, which I have tried to control with varying degrees of success because it does not always serve my interest or the public's."

That temper has followed him throughout his life, McCain acknowledges, does not often serve the pubic’s interest. Ya think?

…"As a young man, I would respond aggressively and sometimes irresponsibly to anyone who I perceived to have questioned my sense of honor and self-respect. Those responses often got me in a fair amount of trouble earlier in life."

He defied authority, ridiculed other students, sometimes fought. The nicknames hung on him at Episcopal mocked his hair-trigger feistiness: "Punk" and "McNasty."

And lest we think that McCain has, as the oldest candidate ever for President, has finally mastered his demon:

In 2007, during a heated closed-door discussion with Senate colleagues about the contentious immigration issue, he angrily shouted a profanity at a fellow Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, an incident that quickly found its way into headlines...

Reports recently surfaced of Rep. Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, taking offense when McCain called him "boy" once too often during a 2006 meeting, a story that McCain aides confirm while playing down its importance. "Renzi flared and he was prickly," McCain strategist Mark Salter said. "But there were no punches thrown or anything."

Catch the persistent framing here? McCain must have a reputation for actually coming to blows with people who tick him off, if anything less is just not a big deal.

Salter, who has co-written five books with McCain that, among other things, explore the origins of his feistiness, said he thinks McCain's temper first became an issue after an incident in 1989, during McCain's first term in the Senate.

The nomination of a beleaguered John Tower to become defense secretary was already in trouble when Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, a conservative Democrat who later became a Republican, helped doom it by voting against Tower. A furious McCain, believing that Shelby had reneged on a commitment of support, accosted him, got within an inch of his nose and screamed at him. News of the incident swiftly spread around the Capitol….

Part of the paradox of McCain is that many of the old targets of his volcanic temper are now his campaign contributors. Former Phoenix mayor Paul Johnson is one example. In 1992, during a private meeting of Arizona officials over a federal land issue that affected the state, a furious McCain openly questioned Johnson's honesty. "Start a tape recorder -- it's best when you get a liar on tape," McCain said to others in the meeting, according to an account of their "nose-to-nose, testosterone-filled" argument that Johnson later provided to reporters. But Johnson, who once was quoted as saying that he thought McCain was "in the area of being unstable," today says that he has mellowed…

Wow, well that’s a comfort.

And this is the person that polls show more American’s feel confident in trusting our military to than Barack Obama, the cool-headed, never-seems-to-get flustered man of compromise?! Have we lost our collective minds?

If George Bush – who was never more than a cheerleader and a pretend cowboy – can wreak such havoc on the world and the US reputation in it – just imagine what could happen with this hair-triggered bully in charge!

The Democrats need to refresh the mushroom-cloud ad that took Goldwater out of contention – and this time, it would be more justified.