McCain’s new friends

October 11, 2006

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has dipped more than a toe into the blogosphere in recent months, yesterday going to so far as to write a post on North Korea (which, in part, blamed Clinton’s “failed” policy) at Captain’s Quarters, one of the right’s leading blogs.

I’m not surprised that McCain would conduct some extensive online outreach in advance of ’08, but I am a little surprised he’d pick Captain’s Quarters as one of the sites. Consider, for example, this CQ post from last year.

…I initially heard this exchange on the Hugh Hewitt show, and I almost choked when Hugh referred to McCain as a “great American,” in Hugh’s classy way of framing the debate. I cannot support that notion. McCain served his country admirably in Viet Nam, but his career as a politician contains nothing but a series of sell-outs and the worst kind of self-promotion.

This self-described “maverick” started his Senate career by peddling his influence to Charles Keating, who fleeced the FSLIC for billions of dollars. McCain claimed to be the least tarnished of the Keating 5 and the least culpable, but in the meantime his family had invested heavily in Keating’s businesses and traveling on Keating junkets to the Bahamas and other fancy vacations. […]

McCain was a brave man in Viet Nam. He became a craven politician a long time ago, however, and almost everything he’s done since shows that he hasn’t changed a bit. If I still lived in Arizona, I’d be looking for ways to recall him from office immediately. It’s time for the GOP to quit kissing McCain’s ass and apply another extremity to it with noticeable force — and to strip him of his committee assignments as soon as possible. Let him switch parties if he likes. He’s useless and a disgrace as a Republican. (emphasis added)

This isn’t a half-hearted criticism; this is wholesale condemnation.

I’m honestly not quite sure what to make of this. Does McCain deserve credit for writing for Captain’s Quarters after this? Is it a tad hypocritical of Captain’s Quarters to promote McCain after calling him a “disgrace”? I’m curious what you guys think about this.

Off-topic:

Tired of listening to Tim Russert interviewing Condi Rice?

Click here to listen to Matt Rothschild interviewing Howard Zinn.

WHAT a breath of fresh air….

  • It’s really simple: They’re both hypocrites. McCain pretends CQ didn’t say that to get to the goons that read it to shore up a part of the base and CQ pretends it didn’t write it so that a front-runner will put up content.

    They deserve each other.

  • I know one of McCain’s “old friends,” who were even less fond of him in the past than his new ones. This is part of a message I got from this guy, who I must also say is as loose-hinged a wingnut I’ve ever found. He once changed his position on something simply because I agreed with him.

    This guy was at the Naval Academy with McCain, and perhaps some of the vitriol is sour grapes. I’m saving up on my “sic’s,” so I’ll leave his unique punctuation as is:

    I don’t know if I told you but McLame is a classmate of mine (USNA ’58) from the Naval Academy…I knew him but truthfully I could not say we were buddies. He was very friendly with the Brigade Commander who was in my company and lived next door to me.

    He was a fuck-up at the trade school and and one in the navy… most of his classmates (at least those with whom I have maintained connections) believe the fact his Dad and Grandfather were both Admirals kept him in the academy and the Navy

    Only after using his Airplane to intercept a SAM and becoming a POW did he get any respect..the fact is he was always fighting bucking the “system” which was probably the one character trait he had that served him well as a POW. .

    When he ran for President he did nor receive much support from his classmates

    McLame like John Glenn got caught with his hand in the Cookie jar (The Keating five) McLame married the daughter of the beer baron of Arizona.. (Like Kerry he came to appreciate the finer things in life a wealthy wife could provide)
    after ditching his first wife who raised his kids and remained faithful during his internment..His new wife like Theresa financed his run for office

    Seems like Johnny has been choosing his friends based on short-term poitical advantage for a long time. Neocons equate him with Kerry, evangelicals think he’s immoral, and the Keating Five seems to be the only finance scandal the GOP ever took seriously. When getting the base out to vote is key to your chances, McCain’s system bucking seems to be just what the GOP doesn’t need.

  • It seems like McCain’s M.O. He seems to be searching out lions’ dens to go into. Perhaps he knows the depth of his disconnect with far-right voters and thinks this is the only way to get the percentage of them that he needs. I guess after 6 years of torture a little bad-mouthing doesn’t bother him much.

    I was also thinking that when I think of McCain’s efforts to befriend the far right I think of it as servile and unprincipled. But McCain doesn’t feel the same way about those people as I do. So, to him, it’s not as despicable as it is to me.

    What bothers me is that Bush painted him with this brush back in 2000 and I hate to think Bush could have actually been right.

  • McCain is an interesting dichotomy:

    Some on the right hate him because they see him as some moderate “maverick.”

    Some on the left hate him because his voting record proves that he’s solidly conservative and that the maverick label is a farce.

    Yet some on both sides like him because of his carefully crafted – yet utterly false – moderate image.

    I just don’t get it. The guy’s a dyed-in-the-wool rightwinger and, as noted above, his voting record proves it. Why the right hates him so much, and why so many on the left think he’s alright, is beyond me.

    As far as him posting on CQ, it all comes down to one thing: Traffic. The Capt. saw an opportunity to have a big-name politico post on his site, and just couldn’t pass up the chance to make himself look like he’s got connections. Anything that happened before doesn’t matter in that context – all that matters is the page views.

    Quite frankly, it makes the Capt. look like a pandering ass kisser. Which doesn’t really surprise me any …

  • Only after using his Airplane to intercept a SAM …

    That made me chuckle …

    Now if McCain would just use his political career to intercept Bush, I’d be a happy man.

  • “I’m curious what you guys think about this.” – CB

    I think that George Felix Allen Junior (Sen. (R) VA) was a certain segment of the Right’s candidate for 2008 because they saw him far more as a successor to the Boy George II tradition than McCain ever would be (i.e., totally stupid and manipulable 😉 ). McCain, who has lined up certain ex-Bushite political operatives, sees himself not as a successor but as a President. And I feel he’s doing whatever he feels he needs to (after having been burned in 2000) to achieve his party’s nomination.

    None of that changes what McCain basically is. I don’t know if he’s a political coward, but he is certainly manipulative. He lined the airlines up a few years ago and threatened them with a “Airline Passanger’s Bill of Rights”. They caved. That is, they gave him and his gang a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions. They did nothing for passangers of course, but McCain let the issue drop.

    Besides being an extreme conservative, that’s the kind of person he is. Which is why under no circumstances (McCain versus H. Clinton even) will I be voting for him.

  • Biggest. Whore. Ever.

    I was reading up on him yesterday and was interested to note that he started having an affair because his first wife was in a serious car accident while he was in Vietnam. There you have his entire way of thinking in a nutshell: Something doesn’t work the way you want (an idea, a value, a wife) you get rid of it. I reckon the only reason he didn’t dump wife numero dos for her drug problems is because of the cash. Yep, he’s 100% BushCo material, ie a big skeevy whore.

    I also read that he suffers with recurrent bouts of skin cancer. McCain. He makes his own skin crawl.

  • “I was reading up on him yesterday and was interested to note that he started having an affair because his first wife was in a serious car accident while he was in Vietnam.” – TAIO

    So was she as maimed as he is? The man can’t raise his arms above his shoulders because of the “two days of standing” that the NV’s made him do.

  • McCain seems to have gone to the Arlen Specter school of politics. To the tune of KC and the Sunshine Band, “Make a little noise, do a little dance, lay down tonight.” All semblance of respectability has left the Republiclowns and the timing coincided with passage of a bill allowing President IQ81 to decide what torture is and discarding Habeas Corpus. All the actions of Shrub’s Armageddon Administration and the ruling Republiclowns reek of desperation. It must be painful to feel power slip from your grasp. I wonder how the Stain on the rug in the Oval Office will handle it.

  • @11
    From an article about their divorce:

    “Carol McCain skidded off a road into a telephone pole in an accident that left her with a broken arm and a ruptured spleen after she was thrown through the windshield.”

    Did they have safety glass on autos in 1969?

    From wikipedia (take with a chunk of salt the size of your head):
    Upon returning home in 1973, McCain found his wife to be very different from when he had married her.
    (Translation: His pretty ex-model wife was no longer so pretty and he went in search of new booty until he find some that was hot and rich.)

    The settlement papers noted Shepp was going to have continued extensive medical expenses almost a decade after the accident. I would guess that between his plane crash, capture and captivity (plus a bad car wreck soon after he got out of Vietnam), he wins the “Most Maimed” sweepstakes. Aaand, he still wins the biggest whore contest.

  • McCain is really peculiar. He doesn’t seem to have an ounce of pride left. Dump a bucket of piss and shit all over him and he’ll somehow find a way to smile half-heartedly. What the prison camp couldn’t do to him (apparently) the campaign trail and lust for power seems to have accomplished quite well.

  • McCain—diss someone, then embrace their philosophy. get dissed by someone else, then work for them and profit from it. Buy. Sell. Buy it back…Sell it back to the guy you sold it to the first time. It’s the same M.O., just as Dale mentioned—but it’s got nothing to do with “lions’ dens.” It’s the same old shell-game tactic he played with Keating, all those years ago….

  • Any thought or statement from the right is infinitely malleable.

    If what lost ground yesterday turns into something that will gain ground today, then spin around and speak the new truth. Hell, even if it changes in the next 5 minutes or even 5 seconds. That’s plenty of time for truth to age into falsehood and need a makeover.

    The word hypocrite has truly grown up and become a word of substance during the ShrubCo years. It always had potential but ShrubCo has pumped it up and put some color in it’s cheeks.

    Hypocrite – The Golden Years.

  • I wasn’t surprised at all that McCain attacked Clinton for NK. More, I think he knows it’s crap. But he figured, with his usual political calculus, that this was a way to score cheap points with the ‘wingers while not upsetting any folks in the middle who might be persuadable for him in 2008.

    The guy might be a whore, but he’s not a fool. The Democrats better start thinking hard now about how they want to come at him.

  • Not so surprising:

    McCain was a brave man in Viet Nam. He became a craven politician a long time ago, however, and almost everything he’s done since shows that he hasn’t changed a bit.

    A wingnut gets something right for a change.

    Actually, one doesn’t have to be a wingnut to hear the criticism in #1 here from people who knew McCain in the Navy – he was a “George W. Bush” who knew the fact he had two of the best Admirals in the history of the Navy for father and grandfather would keep the Navy from giving him grief. I’ve even heard this from “liberals.” So it’s true that the most honorable thing McCain did was behave as he was supposed to while a prisoner. That in itself is no mean achievement given the circumstances, but the other residents of the Hanoi Hilton managed the same thing. One former POW I met says the amazing thing about McCain as aPOW was that he did live up to the commandments, given his prior history.

    I hope the Right does a good job of getting the word out about McCain – who really was a scumball on the Keating 5 business – and wrecks his 2008 chances. Let them form the circular firing squads and let us stand back. We reap the benefit of the most electable of that race of morons known as God’s Own Predators being made unelectable.

  • the dittomonkeys refer to him as a liberal. he better start kissing some bloated junkie ass, asap

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