by Teh Nutroots | Via Digby and C&L, read this Kansas City Star account of McCain's temper issues, listing incidents that you might not be aware of. Allegedly, and surprisingly, families of POW's and MIA's have come in for their share of it.
Families of POW-MIAs said they have seen McCain's wrath repeatedly...In 1992, McCain sparred with Dolores Alfond, the chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen and Women, at a Senate hearing. McCain's prosecutorlike questioning of Alfond - available on YouTube - left her in tears.(KanasCity.com)
Yep. Watch it happen here:
Here's more from the same article:
Four years later, at her group's Washington conference, about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.
Six people present have written statements describing what they saw. According to the accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.
As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, the mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.
"McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him," according to Eleanor Apodaca, the sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967.
McCain's staff wouldn't respond to requests for comment about specific incidents.
But Mark Salter, a longtime McCain aide who functions as the senator's alter ego and the co-author of his books, said that, "McCain gets intense, and intent on his argument." (KanasCity.com)
Lots of other blow-ups documented in the piece.
In January, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told The Boston Globe that "the thought of (McCain) being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me." (Cochran has since endorsed McCain.)....
Cochran recalled earlier this summer that he saw McCain manhandle a Sandinista official during a 1987 diplomatic mission in Nicaragua.
Cochran told the Biloxi Sun Herald that McCain was talking, and, "I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever."
McCain said the incident never took place. "I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much," he told a news conference. "But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn't happen."(KanasCity.com)
He actually told this story himself:
[I]n 1989....he confronted Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, then a Democrat and now a Republican, because Shelby had promised to vote for McCain friend John Tower as secretary of defense, and then Shelby voted against Tower.
McCain later wrote how, after the vote, he approached Shelby "to bring my nose within an inch of his as I screamed out my intense displeasure over his deceit ... the incident is one of the occasions when my temper lived up to its exaggerated legend."(KanasCity.com)
Yep, that's the sort of "leader of the free world" who appeals to the Peter Pans of the Republican party. As we know, they love playing with plastic cowboys and tin soldiers. At least McCain was---a long time ago---an actual soldier.
But that ain't all. Read the whole article. And be sure to watch these:
Meanwhile, former Bush-backer Ed Koch is scared of Sarah Palin. Apparently he made up his mind based on the discredited rumor that she tried to ban library books. Politico has his full endorsement statement. Ben Smith says:
Koch is a member of a set of secular, swing-voting Jewish Democrats who may have been pushed away by the selection of Palin, and his endorsement may be a marker of an opportunity for Obama to strengthen his campaign among older Jewish voters in Florida.
Memeorandum has more on Koch's Palin-terror here.
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Wait, wait, wait. That profanity clip is fake. There's no such profanity in the non-censored version. I don't want McCain to get elected as much as the next guy, and it would be of better benefit to all of us to use authentic footage against him. I'm sure there's plenty of it.
Posted by: Ryan | September 10, 2008 at 03:24 AM