Temperament

FEAR

Senator McCain and Governor Palin want to make us afraid that Senator Obama is dangerously liberal – a charge made laughable by the support of, among so many others, Susan Eisenhower, Warren Buffett, and Wick Allison (the former publisher of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, who maxed out to McCain in the primary but has switched to Obama).

The thing to be afraid of is Senator McCain’s dangerous temperament. He is an angry man. Click here for a short video that makes the case.

WHY ALL THE BASHING?

It’s distasteful – but we just can’t suffer four more years of unsuccessful leadership. It’s not clear to me we can survive four more years of this. I want ‘elite’ leadership from people whose intelligence and judgment are superb. Any man who would impulsively choose to entrust our future, if something happened to him, to a woman who got a D in macroeconomics and whose foreign policy credentials consists of being able to see Russia from her house is simply not a man of good judgment.

Speaking of which . . .

DO YOU REALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS GUY?

For example, do you know he crashed two Navy planes in the United States (where enemy fire was minimal) – and caused a black-out in Spain when he sliced through a power wire – before he ever got shot down in Vietnam?

Rolling Stone offers this cover story:

Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM DICKINSON

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It’s the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose.

Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There’s a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam – call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met.”

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going to, John?”

“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

“I got a better chance of getting laid.”

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”

. . . This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. . . .

. . . 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.” . . .

☞ There’s much more. Inasmuch as we may be entrusting our prosperity to this man for the next four years, you may wish to read the whole thing.