Posted on 02/22/2008 12:54:53 AM PST by Kurt Evans
John Sidney McCain III entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland in 1954. Young McCain wanted to become an admiral. He planned to achieve the distinction of being the "first son and grandson of four star admirals" . But that was not to be. McCain III possessed none of the innate character and discipline traits that helped mold his father and grandfather into great military leaders.
Family Connections and Special Privileges:
His father, John S. "Junior" McCain, and grandfather, John S. McCain, Sr., were famous four-star Admirals in the U.S. Navy. His father commanded U.S. forces in Europe before becoming commander of American forces fighting in Vietnam. His grandfather commanded naval aviation at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Both men became highly influential in U.S. Navy operations.
At the Academy, aside being known as a "rowdy, raunchy, underachiever" who resented authority, Cadet McCain became infamous as a leader among his fellow midshipmen for organizing "off-Yard activities" and hard drinking parties. Robert Timberg wrote in his book , The Nightingale's Song, that "being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck."
McCain's grades were "marginal." He drew so many demerits for breaking curfew and other discipline issues that he graduated fifth from the bottom of the class of 1958. Despite his low "class standing," and no doubt because of the influence of his family of famous Admirals, McCain was leap-frogged ahead of more qualified applicants and granted a coveted slot to be trained as a navy pilot.
Good Party Animal - Bad Pilot:
He spent the next two and a half years as a "naval aviator in training" at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida and Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, flying A-1 Skyraiders. While a pilot trainee, McCain continued to party hard. He drove a Corvette and dated an exotic dancer named "Marie the Flame of Florida." Timberg wrote that McCain "learned to fly at Pensacola, though his performance was below par, at best good enough to get by. He liked flying, but didn't love it."
McCain Lost Five Military Aircraft:
McCain, the "below par" pilot, eventually lost 5 military aircraft, the first during a training flight in 1958 when he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay while trying to land. The Navy ignored the crash and graduated McCain in 1960.
While deployed in the Mediterranean, the hard partying McCain lost a second aircraft. Timberg described the crash: "Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula, he took out some power lines which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral."
Unscathed, McCain returned to Pensacola Station where he was promoted to flight instructor for Naval Air Station Meridian in Mississippi. The airfield at Meridian, McCain Field, was named in honor of McCain's grandfather.
In 1964 McCain became involved with Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he had met at Annapolis. They were married in Philadelphia on July 3, 1965.
Flight instructor McCain lost a third aircraft while flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game. Timberg wrote that McCain radioed, "I've got a flameout" before ejecting at one thousand feet. McCain parachuted onto a beach moments before his plane slammed into a clump of trees. The Navy dismissed the crash as "unavoidable" and assigned McCain to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in December 1966, which was patrolling the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.
In Spring 1967, the Forrestal was assigned to join the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam. McCain lost his fourth plane on board the Forrestal on July 29, 1967 when a rocket inadvertently slammed into his bomb laden jet. McCain escaped, but the explosions that followed killed 134 sailors. McCain was transferred from the badly damaged Forrestal to the USS Oriskany. Shortly afterwards, on Oct. 26, 1967, he was down and captured by the Vietnamese.
Post-POW Years: Political Ambition and a New, Young, Rich Wife:
Upon his release from North Vietnam and return to the United States in 1973, McCain reunited with his wife, Carol, who had been permanently crippled in a car accident while he was a POW. Still yearning to become an admiral, McCain enrolled in the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. and underwent physical therapy in order to fly again. The Navy excused his permanent disabilities and reinstated him to flight status, effectively positioning him for promotion.
Timberg described McCain's advancement: "in the fall of 1974, McCain was transferred to Jacksonville as the executive officer of Replacement Air Group 174, the long-sought flying billet at last a reality. A few months later, he assumed command of the RAG, which trained pilots and crews for carrier deployments. The assignment was controversial, some calling it favoritism, a sop to the famous son of a famous father and grandfather, since he had not first commanded a squadron, the usual career path."
While Executive Officer and later as Squadron Commander McCain used his authority to arrange frequent flights that allowed him to carouse with subordinates and "engage in extra-marital affairs." This was a clear violation of the Military Code of Conduct rules against adultery and fraternization with subordinates. But, as with all his other past behaviors, McCain was never penalized; instead he always got away with his transgressions.
Timberg wrote, "Off duty, usually on routine cross-country flights to Yuma and El Centro, John started carousing and running around with women. To make matters worse, some of the women with whom he was linked by rumor were subordinates . . . At the time the rumors were so widespread that, true or not, they became part of McCain's persona, impossible not to take note of."
In early 1977, Admiral Jim Holloway, Chief of Naval Operations promoted McCain to captain and transferred him from his command position "to Washington as the number-two man in the Navy's Senate liaison office. McCain was promptly given total control of the office. It wasn't long before the "fun loving and irreverent" McCain had turned the liaison office into a "late-afternoon gathering spot where senators and staffers, usually from the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, would drop in for a drink and the chance to unwind."
In 1979, while attending a military reception in Hawaii, McCain met and fell in love with Cindy Lou Hensley, 17 years his junior, who was the daughter of James W. Hensley, a wealthy Anheuser-Busch distributor from Phoenix, Arizona. McCain filed for and obtained an uncontested divorce from his wife in Florida on April 2, 1980 and promptly married Cindy on May 17, 1980.
He resigned from the Navy in 1981 and went to work for his father-in-law in Phoenix; where he used the opportunity to make powerful and wealthy friends in Arizona including banker Charles Keating and Duke Tully, the editor-in-chief of the Arizona Republic. Keating was later convicted of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy and Tully was disgraced for concocting a phony military record of combat in Korea and Vietnam including medals for heroism. McCain ran for Arizona's First Congressional District in 1982. McCain won the congressional seat. In 1987 McCain was elected to the Senate.
Try to imagine that not everything is agenda-driven for a moment, okay. In other words, stop assuming that everything is the way you see it, and the question becomes a very valid exercise. Of course, this requires you to leave your own, comfortable world where all your ducks are lined up just so.
The way you carry on does indeed remind me of a classroom and your condescending attitude so like that of my students. Grow up.
The conservatives. The “Republican party” is made up of whatever people decide they’d like to be called “Republican”.
Look at the Democratic Party. Look at the liberal rankings of their last 4 candidates. There were some who suggested that picking Clinton in 1992 would kill the party by alienating the liberals.
But instead, the liberals just worked harder to take back the party, and they have won more and more liberal candidates.
That is a much better model than the one the conservatives suggest — deliberately throwing elections and stabbing our fellow republicans in the back for not picking “our candidate”. This is something we scream at the moderates for pulling on us when we DO pick a conservative candidate.
If we pull out, the republicans will simply attract more moderates and independents, and move more to the left, to try to make up for our votes.
When you are ready to abandon your party’s presidential candidate, the only sane thing is to form a new party. Your never coming back to the party you abandoned. The lesson you want to teach won’t be the lesson they learn. Maybe you’ll form a new party, and over time more conservatives and moderates will wander over to your party and away from the party you left.
But probably not.
If we had just picked Olympia Snowe to be our nominee, I’d consider the party lost.
McCain has a passable position on two of the three legs of conservatism. It’s unfortunate he has so much baggage, but he’s hardly a liberal, hardly socialist, hardly a RINO.
He’s a fiscal conservative, a limited-government pork-busting conservative, who largely supports tax cuts. He opposed bush’s tax cuts, but personally I think that was somewhat colored by his arguments with Bush over the election. Vindictive, maybe, but he didn’t cast a deciding vote against the tax cuts, and he supports them now.
His McCain/Feingold is horrible. But at least he doesn’t support the Fairness doctrine, and has shown that he wants an FCC that is limited in its scope, not overbearing like the democrats.
His position on amnesty has no redeeming features. But both democrats are worse, McCain has at least embraced the idea of taking care of the borders first, and it’s unlikely his replacement in the senate could be as pro-amnesty as he was. Plus, he was a strong voice in the senate for his position, and so maybe next time those pushing amnesty will miss that voice. And maybe when he has to study the issue from the executive branch he might come somewhat more to the conclusion that his policies would have been bad. But in any case, even in this he’s better than the democrat.
He is largely pro-life, and has adopted stronger pro-life positions that are good ones, EXCEPT for his position on embryonic stem cells. I’m dissappointed, because without a president who opposes it, we will have federal funding.
However, virtual NO child who would otherwise have lived on this earth will end up dead because of what McCain does on embryonic stem cell research. I know this is a practical argument, but abortion kills a child who would otherwise be born. Embryos are sitting frozen, to live out their “lives” until the freezer breaks or they are otherwise discarded. Testing on them is inhumane, and cheapens life, but it’s not practically the same as ending a life that otherwise was going to be born and grow up and die.
So I don’t think pro-lifers should reject him on that basis, even though we had every right to support a candidate who held the correct position on that issue when there WERE such candidates that were viable.
His gun position is likewise adequate. He had some weird “gun-show-loophole” legislation that was actually WORSE than the typical “close the gun-show loophole” tripe, because it would have required every attendee at a gun show to get a criminal background check for entrance.
On the other hand, if we acknowledge that people who are felons should be restricted from buying weapons, it’s not all that big a stretch to accept a candidate who simply thinks that background checks can be extended to purchasers in the private market, even though we disapprove of that position. It’s a matter of degree.
It pains me to have to think about McCain’s positions on issues, especially coming from the Romney camp where on virtually every issue, I could proudly quote from his position papers and policy speeches to show him as a solid conservative.
But in the real world, McCain, while no “conservative”, is no flaming liberal either. I know I’ve left out some liberal things he has done. But most people leave out a lot of conservative things he has done. He’s maybe more of a pragmatist than an ideologue, except that he doesn’t change his positions as much as a pragmatist would be expected to.
He is largely pro-life, and has adopted stronger pro-life positions that are good ones, EXCEPT for his position on embryonic stem cells. I’m dissappointed, because without a president who opposes it, we will have federal funding.
He has sued pro-life groups in federal court.
“It was Republican McCain who called Sampley ‘one of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter’ and said ‘Sampley has a nose for publicity and knack for making money from invented controversies’.”
Well, then, if we are always choosing the lesser of two evils, I suppose we must ultimately expect that we will wind up in a place that is...evil.
My major issue with the man, and it covers most of the issues that I hate him over is that whenever you see McCain working WITH another Senator, it is a liberal Senator.
Whenever you see him attacking (usually from behind) any cause, issue or politician, it is a conservative one.
I will not vote for someone that I hate on a deeply personal level.
Great comments.
I am no friend to John McCain and it troubles me to even consider casting my vote for him in November.
However, I would like to thank you for your posting diligence, as with each post in your support of Huckabaptist, I find it easier to see myself eventually voting for McCain.
I think that this is the key to McCain's denunciation of The Swiftboaters. He had been dogged by Samplely for years with this type of vacuous crap. Kerry had been Sampley's second target. Samply had tried to align himself with the Swiftboaters and implied that he had a leadership role there. McCain looked at the Swifties and saw Sampley or similar.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
He actually does work with conservative senators all the time.
But when you “see” him, it’s because he does something the media wants to highlight. That’s always him working with Democrats.
When have you ever seen the media do a picture and story of republicans working together without democrats?
Not over their pro-life position.
Only wild women! ;)
Why would McCain, a RINO himself pick a steadfast Republican who would continually shame him for his socialist decisions?
“Ted Samply is a former SF sgt. who no self respecting soldier, airman or Mairine would walk across a street to spit on. He has and will continue to use the POW/MIA issue to line his own pockets.”
“Documents filed with the court revealed the extent to which Sampley had made use of the statue and, indeed, of the entire POW issue.
The material showed that he had created a self-contained financial network that revolved around POWs and MIAs. One of Sampley’s companies, Red Hawk, manufactured the POW T-shirts and sold them to his nonprofit Homecoming II, which in turn sold them at the vigil booth. Although Sampley could say he was destitute, with only one personal bank account containing $ 1 00, the organizations were quite healthy. His reported earnings from the cash-only T-shirt concession amounted to nearly $2 million over three years.
The cash flow was 7 abundant. In August 1991 alone, Homecoming II wrote ten checks to Red Hawk, totaling more than $18,000. Some of the checks were written on the same day or only a few days apart.
Despite the constant influx of money, Sampley did not pay the people who worked at the vigil booth. They were considered volunteers. Sampley also used them to compile data for his POW/ MIA biography project and to fold copies of U.S. Veteran News and Report.
In return for their work, which continued in shifts around the clock, the volunteers got a place to sleep at the Homecoming II House in Annandale, Virginia.
I visited the house shortly before Christmas of 1992 and found a stark arrangement that worked entirely to Sampley’s benefit. Residents explained that they had to buy their own food and personal goods, even though they worked full time for no pay.
Among the volunteers was Cheyenne Borton, an eighteen-year-old girl who was the only female in a houseful of middle-aged men. Cheyenne explained how Sampley had arranged the volunteers’ sleeping quarters: “When the house is full, you just pick a place on the floor.”
Despite its similarities to a nineteenth-century workhouse, the Homecoming II facility did not come under scrutiny in the course of the Hart/Scruggs lawsuit. The judge did not look into the financial dealings of the house, nor did he examine its relationship to Sampley’s Red Hawk corporation. He merely looked at the concession stand sales figures and ordered Sampley to pay royalties in the amount Of $359,442.92.
It was only a symbolic victory for Hart and Scruggs. Sampley said he wasn’t going to pay and successfully resisted all attempts to collect on the judgment.
I asked Sampley how he had managed to avoid doing what the court had ordered. “I immediately put Red Hawk out of business,” he said. “I sold everything they owned, and paid bills. I closed down Homecoming II. I heard that Scruggs was planning to levy the vigil site, so I gave it away. I put everything into another nonprofit group.”
When sheriffs arrived to foreclose on Sampley, there was nothing to seize. 8
Sampley, who says he has spent more than a half-million dollars defending himself on the T-shirt charge, emerged energized by the conflict. When it seemed as if the fight with Scruggs had progressed as far as it would go, Sampley turned to new attention-grabbing projects and reverted to one of his stock-in- trade publicity stunts, the bamboo cage. In the fall of 1993 he erected a cage outside the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base and arranged for three MIA wives to starve themselves inside. While in the cage, the women ingested varying combinations of water, juice, and vitamins, but none took any food. The fast was a protest against President Clinton’s plan to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam.”
McCain draws scrutiny over $1m loan to campaign
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/johnmccain.barackobama
[snip]The Federal Election Commission (FEC) released a letter to McCain today that questions his ability to withdraw from the presidential public financing system – and avoid the spending limits that come with it. The FEC asked McCain to explain whether he used public funds as collateral for a $1m bank loan last month, a move that would commit him to a taxpayer-funded campaign.
The query is especially awkward on a day the senator is fighting allegations he had an affair with a lobbyist, and given that he has blasted Obama for appearing to hedge on his pledge to accept public financing for the general election. The likely Republican nominee accused Obama of “Washington doublespeak” yesterday, noting that both men agreed to take taxpayer funds and play by the rules that doing so entails.
Name for me three pieces of legislation that he worked closely with *Conservative Senators on in the past 7 years.
* Note, Republicans and conservatives are two very different things.
hehehehehe.....this election is going to be “eventful” and a possible watershed event that will for our lifetimes at least, spell out just what the Repubes stand for, if anything.
This ‘election’? It’s the gift that just keeps giving, ain’t it? ....sigh...
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