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September 15, 2008
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Before heading off for his ill-fated time in Vietnam,
John McCain, "...drove a Corvette and dated an exotic dancer."
This is not gossip, it is directly from the
introduction that was given to him at the Republican Convention.
It is a cute thing to say, that he "dated and
exotic dancer," but add this to that fact: John McCain is now
married to a drug addict who reportedly used a scheme involving a
charity she was involved with and doctor shopping to keep up a drug
habbit. (See the Washington Post
A Tangled Story of Addiction: Consequences of Cindy McCain's
Drug Abuse Were More Complex Than She Has Portrayed.") In
between, John McCain had a marriage in which he cheated on his wife.
Now we can take a second to relate some of what's
been said about McCain with regard to his first wife. In that
now ex-wife's words, from an article in the
UK Daily Mail:
"My marriage ended because John McCain didn't want to
be 40, he wanted to be 25... Some of McCain's acquaintances are less
forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred
womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to 'play the
field'. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo
beauty queen, for financial reasons.
A bit more about that marriage in a second, but
first, to stay on topic, take this bit from that same article, which
talks about the time before he went off to fight.
"The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s
sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but
domesticity was clearly beginning to bore McCain – the couple were
regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain
requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966."
By McCain's own admission during his acceptance
speech, he was not in Vietnam because he saw some great cause.
In his own words (see
NPR's transcript of his speech:
"On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin, I
prepared for my 23rd mission over North Vietnam. I hadn't any
worry I wouldn't come back safe and sound. I thought I was tougher
than anyone. I was pretty independent then, too. I liked to bend a
few rules, and pick a few fights for the fun of it. But I did it
for my own pleasure, my own pride. I didn't think there was a
cause more important than me."
You can see in his words the correlation to him
leaving his home for the War because it seems more fun. "...I
did it for my own pleasure, my own pride. I didn't think there
was a cause more important than me." The fact that he was over
there killing people who never attacked America - that on that
"fated" day, his goal was likely to kill other human beings - those
people we only hear about as a horrible crowd that beat him when he
was shot down - none of that comes out as a part of John's story.
John liked fighting and chaos. It was "fun."
We see the pattern again and again. John McCain
likes chaos. And he lacks any defining principle. It is
a certain type of person who dates strippers, drug addicts, who finds
healthy, regular marriages so boring they'd rather run off to kill
people on the other side of the world, who picks fights for the fun
of it - not for the defense of any principle.
As we've seen John McCain's choices this election
cycle, first, stooping to ads using Paris Hilton and Britney Spears,
then choosing Sarah Palin, at first it seems so detached from what
we have heard about John McCain the highly principled war hero.
But if you start to look at the real pattern of his
life, you start to see the real McCain playing out through these
choices. He finds a normal, sane, respectable campaign as
boring as a normal, sane, respectable marriage and life. And
so, like in his marriage, he runs off for some hot younger thing and
for chaos, and so he inserts Paris Hilton and Britney spears - two drug-problemmed
young hotties - and then Sarah Palin, another younger hotty who
brings with her a swarm of chaos.
The picture is not the one we've been fed, but the
one that jibes with comments like these (also from the Mail
article):
"Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in
Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights,
said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20
years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this
guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.
"‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the
beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost
right away. Everybody around him knew it."
"‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and
beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol
for something he thought was better."
"‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his
character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any
character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol...'"
And former Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot,
who helped pay for the treatment of McCain's first wife after a
bad car accident that happened while John was in Vietnam, had this
to say about John McCain (from the Mail article):
"...(John McCain is) a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even
by the standards of modern politics.
"‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always
reaching for attention and glory,’ (Perot) said. ‘After he came
home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster
girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’"
To note, what Perot is referring to was that Carol
was disfigured in the accident.
The reports about McCain's loss of temper are
well-known and come from prominent Senators on both sides of the
aisle. But the more important picture here is still largely
unspoken. And only now is America getting to see it play out.
The bizarreness, the chaos we are seeing and experiencing, the
constant insertion of hot, young drug addicts and fight pickers into
his campaign, they are not aberrations pushed on McCain by Karl
Rove, as the press has inferred. What we are actually
witnessing is the real John McCain, a man who finds a campaign or
life without hot, young, dirty women in it dull, and who doesn't
live on principle but on a love a chaos that brings him pleasure.
This directly ties in to his campaign themes and
storyline. John McCain is not focusing on policies. What
is he making his campaign about? About making chaos in
Washington. He calls it reform, but it's not reform to a
certain point or policy. It is how he is defining himself - 'I
am someone who likes to reform." Well John, once it's
reformed, what would you want to do with it? And the answer
seems clear - he would be bored and simply want more chaos. He
doesn't want reform for the sake of achieving specific policy ends.
He doesn't talk about what the ends would be in any detail. He
just wants to pick some fights both because he likes the image and
he thinks it's "fun." It fits exactly with what we now know about
him from the information above.
And with adding Palin, he now has the bonus of his
second main love in life, a hot young chick, to go along with it -
in particular, a hot young chick who brings a fair amount of chaos,
with a pregnant daughter, an investigation, a love of picking
fights. Forget that he doesn't share any of the same
principles as her, that she is everything he has claimed to stand
against all of these years.
Suddenly, none of it seems bizarre anymore, does it?
It all cleanly and neatly lines up with his character. The
part that disappears is the part that had this all seeming odd - the
claim that McCain was into reform because he was a principled,
honorable man who cares about "Country First."
We see that that's nonsense. John McCain cares
about "Chaos First," and hot, young, troubled chicks. He went off to kill
innocent people overseas because it was fun. As he put it in
his acceptance speech, "...I did it for my own pleasure, my own
pride. I didn't think there was a cause more important than me."
John McCain uses his prisoner of war story to claim
that now he does it for a cause greater than himself. But it
was after this time that he cheated on his wife. It was after
this time he was involved with the Keating Five scandal. It
was after this time that he chose to marry a drug addict. And
it was after this time that he chose someone who he shares no
principles with as his running mate because she is exciting and
likes to pick fights, and to run gutter ads that seem insane to us,
laced with young starlets that have no place in a Presidential
campaign.
In his 26 years in office, John McCain claims to be a
maverick. But answer this question: what has he claimed
to be a maverick on behalf of? No, John McCain is not a
fighter for a certain cause as, say, Ted Kennedy has been. You
think of Kennedy and you say, "He fought for universal health care."
What has John McCain fought for? And the answer is plain:
he's fought for an excuse to make fighting for fun seem honorable.
That's what the words 'maverick' and 'reform' have been to him, shields
for the fact that McCain is fight without cause, chaos without
a reason.
At least now John McCain and the
campaign he is running makes sense. And his
comment a while back about not caring if we need to stay in Iraq
another 100 years doesn't seem like a slip but rather makes perfect
sense with what we now know: if you don't need a justified cause to
kill, if it is just pleasure, then there is nothing wrong with
another one hundred years of killing and chaos without cause.
The only thing that makes less and less sense the
more we learn about John McCain is the idea of voting for him.
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