Mike's Election Guide Read Online Free PDF Page A

and lifted him out of his chair:
    I don’t know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don’t know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him.
    None of this sounds very surprising about the senator from Arizona who likes to sing “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” in public.
    Republican Party officials had heard enough from Sen. Cochran and, in the summer of ’08, they apparently got hold of Cochran and reeled him in. His tune changed. Through Sen. Cochran’s spokesperson, he said:
    . . . though Sen. McCain has had problems with his temper, he has overcome them. Though Sen. Cochran saw the incident he described to you, decades have passed since then and he wanted to make the point that over the years he has seen Sen. McCain mature into an individual who is not only spirited and tenacious but also thoughtful and levelheaded. As Sen. Cochran said yesterday, he believes Sen. McCain has developed into the best possible candidate for president.
    I wonder now what they are going to do to New Hampshire’s former Republican Senator Bob Smith to get him to retract this comment from April of 2008:
    His [McCain’s] temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.
    Smith added:
    I’ve witnessed a lot of his temper and outbursts. For me, some of this stuff is relevant. It raises questions about stability. . . . It’s more than just temper. It’s this need of his to show you that he’s above you—a sneering, condescending attitude.
    I’ve lost count of how many staff members McCain has fired during the 2008 campaign. First there was John Weaver and Terry Nelson, then it was Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, then Bill McInturff, and then Doug Goodyear, Doug Davenport, Eric Burgeson, and Craig Shirley, and for good measure, Thomas Loeffler. He’s had one “shake up” after another. The latest (as this guide went to press) was the demotion of Rick Davis.
    How could someone go through so many “close” advisors and key staff people in such a short period of time if something about him wasn’t a little “off”? Nothing about this seems stable, and the McCain-loving media haven’t quite known how to handle it because they’ve spent so much time fawning over him since the 2000 campaign. For them to do an honest, hard-hitting story now would make their audience wonder where the heck they’ve been.
    I’ve wondered for some time why hardly anyone has reported this statement from McCain, spoken loudly and freely while riding in 2000 with the press in his Straight Talk Express:
    “I hated the gooks [referring to the Vietnamese] and will continue to hate them as long as I live.”
    And then there was the time at a private GOP meeting in 1999, when McCain went up to fellow Republican senator Pete Domenici and said, “Only an asshole would put together a budget like this. I wouldn’t call you an asshole unless you really were an asshole.”
    McCain’s temper, sadly, isn’t unleashed on only his Senate colleagues, staff, or political opponents. According to Cliff Schecter in his book
The Real McCain,
three reporters confirmed that while on the campaign trail McCain’s wife came up to him, tousled his hair, and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” According to Schecter, “McCain’s face reddened, and he replied, ‘At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***.’”
    It’s almost like you don’t want to go any further, you want to just stop right here and say, “Well, ok, maybe it’s not a good idea to have this guy’s finger on The Button. Is Mitt Romney still available?”
    Why did the Vietnamese shoot down John McCain and put him in prison for five years? He seems like such a nice guy.
    Rose NgBacThiu
    Seattle, WA
    ANSWER: I’m