Mike's Election Guide (5 page)

Come to think of it, as with abortion, Jesus never said one word about homosexuals or gay marriage. So how did all these good Christians end up in charge of the gay discrimination movement when their leader and founder left them no instructions about beating up on homosexuals?

Maybe it’s time to conquer this final frontier of bigotry. Let the gays get married. And if you can’t stand to look at two men making out, just pretend it’s two women.

Ahhh, now isn’t
that
better?

I heard John McCain once flew into a rage. Do you know what set him off? Did he ever calm down?

Mark Gotleib

St. Louis Park, MN

ANSWER:
Once?
This guy is known for going bonkers over the slightest of annoyances. But is it allowable to question a presidential candidate’s mental fitness to occupy the highest office in the land, if not the world? He might get mad at you.

I think it’s a legitimate question for you to ask. They raked Bill Clinton over the coals for his behavior and they published photos of John Kerry riding a windsurfer. So I will attempt to answer your question.

It appears more than a few of McCain’s Republican colleagues in the U.S. Senate have commented on his temper and instability over the years. In January of 2008, Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi had this to say about McCain:

The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.

A chill down the spine? You have to understand that Cochran is considered to be a soft-spoken southern gentleman and is not prone to hyperbole in the Senate. When he made this comment, people knew he would not be saying it unless he meant it.

Cochran also told a reporter about the time he remembered being with McCain on a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua. They were sitting at a table with the president of Nicaragua and suddenly McCain reached across the table, grabbed a government official by his collar 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 guessing, in spite of his anger management issues, he is a nice guy. He has devoted his life to this country. He was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of our nation. And for that, he was tortured and then imprisoned in a North Vietnamese POW camp for nearly five-and-a-half years.

Sadly, McCain’s sacrifice had nothing to do with protecting the United States. He was sent to Vietnam along with hundreds of thousands of others in an attempt to prop up what was essentially an American colony, South Vietnam, which was being run by a dictator whom we installed.

Lest we all forget, the Vietnam War represented a mass slaughter by the United States government on a scale that sought to rival our genocide of the Native Americans. The U.S. Armed Forces killed more than two million civilians in Vietnam (and perhaps another million in Laos and Cambodia). The Vietnamese had done nothing to us. They had not bombed or invaded or even sought to murder a single American. President Johnson and the Pentagon lied to Congress in order to get a vote passed to put the war in full gear. Only two senators had the guts to vote “no.” Almost three million troops ended up serving in Vietnam. The United States dropped more tons of bombs on the Vietnamese people than the Allied powers dropped during all of World War II.

In response, during the nine years of the war, not a single Vietnamese bomb was dropped on U.S. soil, not a single Vietnamese terrorist attack took place in the USA. But we poured 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals on their villages and rice fields. The number of injured, wounded, and severely deformed Vietnamese has never been counted because it’s just too huge for anyone to calculate, let alone comprehend.

And yet, with all the death and destruction we visited upon the Vietnamese, we lost the war. They never gave up. Just as I’d like to think
we
would never give up should we ever be on the receiving end of such a horrific assault from an invading force.

During Christmas of 1972, though the U.S. was only a month away from calling it quits, President Nixon ordered the carpet-bombing of the civilian population of Hanoi and Haiphong. Two thousand combat sorties dropped 20,000 tons of bombs in a final burst of anger for having been beaten by a nation of peasants who didn’t possess a single attack helicopter or bomber plane during the entire war.

John McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam in a campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. During this bombing campaign, which lasted for almost 44 months, U.S. forces flew 307,000 attack sorties, dropping 643,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam (roughly the same tonnage dropped in the Pacific during
all
of World War II). Though the stated targets were factories, bridges, and power plants, thousands of bombs also fell on homes, schools, and hospitals. In the midst of the campaign, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara estimated that we were killing 1,000 civilians a week. That’s more than one 9/11 every single month—for 44 months.

In his book,
Faith of Our Fathers,
McCain wrote that he was upset that he had been limited to bombing military installations, roads, and power plants. He said such restrictions were “illogical” and “senseless.”

“I do believe,” McCain wrote, “that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed.” In other words, McCain believes we could have won the Vietnam War had he been able to drop even
more
bombs.

And thus it was on October 26, 1967, that John McCain, flying in his A-4 Skyhawk, was hit by a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery shell just as he fired off his missile at—not a military target, not an army unit, not a battleship—but an electricity generating station that supplied electrical power to a number of neighborhoods. The target, according to McCain, was in “a heavily populated part of Hanoi.” Heavily populated. A plane from the sky raining missiles down on a heavily populated area of a nation’s capital.

McCain’s plane plunged into a lake not far from the presidential palace. With three broken limbs, McCain was drowning. Vietnamese civilians on the shore dove in to save him. Just like we would do, if someone had just bombed our neighborhood, right?

He was brought ashore and an angry mob formed. They beat him and someone stabbed him in the groin. That’s when Mai Van On, the local villager who helped pull McCain out of the lake, stepped in to save him a second time. He stood in front of McCain and told the mob to back off. Eventually, the police and the army showed up, McCain was apprehended, and it was off to prison for him.

So let me ask the question again. If someone had just been dropping bombs on your home, how would you react? After seeing your child blown to pieces, what would you do to the man who fell out of the sky, the man who committed this act? Please answer honestly.

And if you did decide to let him live, what kind of justice should be handed to him? Should it be the death penalty, the same death penalty we are asking for those charged with 9/11 crimes in Guantánamo Bay? Or should it be life in prison? Would five years be enough? Torture is ALWAYS wrong, even when we do it. Torturing John McCain was outrageous and appalling. I hope the people who perpetrated these heinous acts have apologized to him.

John McCain is already using the Vietnam War in his political ads. In doing so, it makes not just what happened
to him
in Vietnam fair game for discussion, but also what
he did
to the Vietnamese. Considering what the Republicans were willing to do to smear war hero John Kerry in the last election, I don’t want to hear them now say that John McCain’s war record cannot be called into question. I would like to see one brave reporter during the election season ask this simple question of John McCain: “Is it morally right to drop bombs and missiles in a ‘heavily populated’ area where hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians will perish?”

Please explain the electoral college. Can I get in with a 2.0 grade point average?