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Rolling Stone’s McCain smackdown

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Rolling Stone has published a very long, and quite devastating, article called “Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.”

Much of it will be familiar to those who have really paid attention to the details of McCain’s career.  But I don’t know of any other place that assembles so many details so comprehensively, or — and this is key — that relies so heavily on McCain’s own words or on the words of fellow Republicans in giving the lie to McCain’s “maverick” routine.  Particularly devastating, I thought, was the recounting of how heavily McCain took advantage of family connections not only before his experience in Vietnam, but also afterward.  As the article accurately states,

The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations – from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer – that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.

From there, the article goes into a comprehensive rundown of McCain’s ghastly record on the Iraq war, and of his numerous flip-flops on other issues of consequence —

In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq….

Then there’s torture – the issue most related to McCain’s own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to [Larry] Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. “We all knew the opposite was the truth,” recalls Wilkerson. “That’s when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter.”

Read the whole thing.  Seriously.

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Comments

  1. Keating Five Insider!

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    p>Torture!

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    p>Flip-flopper!

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    p>Straight Talk Express!

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    p>But the GOP is dangerous because they will go to all lengths to grab the brass ring!  

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    p>McCain a maverick!?!

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    p>  Palin’s folksiness and attacks!?!

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    p>Get ready the Republicans are going to hit with everything in their power, even what they make up!

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    p>                   Yes we can!

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    p>                  Go Obama-Biden!

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    p>No, I don’t want to have a beer with John McCain!

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    p>                  HPOCRACY STINKS!

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    p>

    • I was working on a post on this article too. For me the recklessness was very significant:

      1. Anger problems are frequently a symptom of recklessness. Even people with anger management issues tend to avoid blowing up in situations where negative consequences are too much. (Beck, Prisoners of Hate) So McCain’s famous problems with anger are part and parcel with his recklessness.
      2. Flying into power lines:

        McCain’s thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described “daredevil clowning” plunged much of the area into a blackout.

        That should have been the end of McCain’s flying career. “In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings,” says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark “a small international incident” like McCain had? Any other pilot would have “found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry,” says Butler.

      3. The incident where he was shot down:

        It was a dangerous mission – taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam’s fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day’s kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. “I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers,” McCain writes. “The A-4 is a small, fast” aircraft that “can outmaneuver a tracking SAM.”

        But McCain didn’t “jink.” Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs – just as the SAM blew his wing off.

  2. I was just about to post the link (but lacked the energy to provide context).

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    p>The Rolling Stone article has gotten me surfing about to try to understand more about McCain’s relationship with Charles Keating and how the Senator came to be exonerated.  Not that I have the answer to that one, but it seems to have something to do with McCain’s hesitancy to promise everything the man asked from him, being called a “wimp” in return, and being sufficiently angered by that to cut ties.  (So perhaps in this case his famous temper may have helped him maintain his “integrity”?)

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    p>Here are a couple of links related to the S&L scandal:
    AZcentral McCain profile chapter on the Keating five

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    p>Phoenix News commentary from November 1990

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    p>

    McCain is the most interesting of all the five defendant senators. No one was closer to Charles Keating than McCain. And no one has wriggled and twisted more vigorously in an effort to distance himself since Keating went down…

    Although McCain doesn’t have to run for office again until 1992, he has been campaigning as furiously as possible during the past few months, attempting to convince his colleagues and constituents of his virtue…

    It has been impossible to go through an entire day in Arizona without seeing, hearing or reading about McCain and his days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

    But there are facts that many remember. McCain behaved like a faithful lap dog for Charlie Keating all those years when McCain was a congressman trying to make it into the United States Senate…

    Now, McCain must explain his activities to the Ethics Committee.

    You can expect him to admit he has made some minor mistakes. He will admit to knowing Keating. But he will emphasize again and again that he never did anything wrong. And he will emphasize that he worked no harder for Keating than he did for any of his other Arizona constituents.

    McCain has even convinced himself that it wasn’t questionable to accept $112,000 from Keating for his election campaign.

    There was also nothing wrong with the fact that his wife and father-in-law were given a sweetheart deal in a shopping-center development with Keating.

    Nor was it wrong to fly on Keating’s private jet free of charge.
    And there was nothing wrong with taking his family to vacation with Keating at his palatial home in the Bahamas.

    Most of the senators who took money from Keating for their election campaigns have returned the money to the government.

    McCain has held on to his $112,000, waiting, he says, for Keating to be proven guilty of some wrongdoing.

    He is one of the most consummate con artists in the United States Senate, an organization comprised of con artists. You can expect a glib, polished performance.

    He will appear humble and repentant. He will speak of honor. He will probably mention the fact that he was a prisoner of war, but that this experience in the savings-and-loan investigation was even more of an ordeal…

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    p>  

  3. Via TPM, I just learned that the documentary I’ve been googling for today — subject:   McCain, deregulation, and the Keating scandal — will become available tomorrow at noon at its own special website.

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    p>Quel timing!

  4. Though clearly not journalistic in any way, the last paragraph and a half of Matt Taibbi’s article on Karl Rove in the same issue is both a brilliant and depressing assessment of American politics. It reads in part:

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    p>

    …this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. He (Rove) survives because an increasing number of Americans secretly agree with Rove’s vision of rules, laws and “the truth” as quaint, faintly embarrassing rituals that only a sucker would let hold him back.

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    p>Unfortunately, I think he’s correct.

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