It not only was his decision but due to his age and health it was a big one. He failed. He pretends to be his own man but has been sucking up to Bush and his criminal enterprise for years.
I agree it’s a pretty odd analogy to make if you’re trying to praise McCain. He was a poor pilot, as evidenced by losing five aircraft, although they kept giving him more planes to crash since he was the son of an admiral.
Yeah, nothing elitist about McCain there. Admittedly the last two were not his fault, but how many pilots would have gotten that 4th plane to fly?
It’s the same sort of spin that paints GWB as some sort of a wonderful and brilliant businessman.
Well, her nomination is certainly evidence of how the Right Wingers, including Palin herself, are now having to step all over their tongues, directly contradicting the exact same arguments they made against Obama and Clinton.
Bunch of freaking hypocrites.
I’d need Airman to be sure about this, but I think that, particularly in wartime, pilots are considered more valuable than planes, and McCain would have been given planes as long as he was willing an able to fly them. Jet fighters are stereotypically hotdogs.
I have never been a fighter pilot, but when folks are shooting at you in a war, i don’t think losing a plane is a particularly difficult thing.
I disagree with this. If he was truly the “Maverick” he’s made out to be, he could have just said no. What could they do? Pull their support days before the convention? They would have had to gone along with McCain’s choice, whoever it may have been. For this reason, he really does have to take full responsibility should this blow up in his face.
Not entirely. He was threatened with a full-bore floor fight if he went with Lieberman or Ridge. Maybe he would have won, maybe not. It would not have been pretty on TV (although it would have garnered a lot of viewers!). But I agree that this choice was McCain’s. Just not his first choice or his second.
True. But four out of five of his planes were lost in noncombat-related accidents.
I love you how guys are quick to scream LIAR at any Republican who diverts from the Obama script, but you’re willing to repeat crap like this without a hint of critical thought.
I happen to know something about this. I’m a pilot, I worked on a military base, and knew lots of jet fighter pilots. I used to teach ground school for pilots. Let me give you some facts about these losses:
The first crash happened during training. McCain claims his engine failed, causing him to land short in the bay. Now, it appears that McCain was not a great pilot, at least procedurally, so I’m willing to say that this could have been pilot error. I’m sure the engine failed, but by McCain’s own admission he spent more time reading books like “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” than his flight manuals. Poor procedures can cause an engine failure on landing - for example, not using carb heat. But the Navy looked at it and decided that it didn’t warrant booting him out of flight school. He may in fact have done nothing wrong at all. Engines fail, and if they fail on final approach, you’re in trouble.
The next accident was not a crash, but an ‘incident’. Basically, McCain clipped some power lines and blacked out an area. I couldn’t find any reports of him actually crashing, though. But this is a very common type of incident - attack pilots are trained to fly missions ‘on the deck’, and have to practice them. Here in Canada, we had the F-104 Starfighter, which is a horrible aircraft to use for low flight, but the pilots were told to practice it anyway when stationed in Germany, leading to the old joke - “How do you get your own Starfighter? You buy a plot of land in Germany and wait.” I doubt that the incident would be held against a pilot at that time - such flying was considered to be a sign of having the right stuff.
McCain was then promoted to flight instructor, which suggests that while he may not have been very interested in the procedures manuals, he must have been a pretty good stick and rudder pilot. In any event, his third accident happened when his jet flamed out. He tried to relight three times, with no luck. There’s no way this is his fault, unless the thing ran out of gas, and no one has suggested it did. Mechanical failures happen. In fact, McCain ejected at low altitude because he stayed with his jet long enough to ensure it impacted an unpopulated area.
The fourth accident had nothing to do with McCain at all. He was sitting in his cockpit on the carrier Forrestal, waiting to take off, when a missile was accidentally launched from another jet and slammed into his plane. He was lucky to get out alive, and after getting out, he went to help with the fire and was almost killed when an explosion blew him across the flight deck. 134 other sailors died.
Incidentally, McCain could have gone home right there. The Forrestal and its crew were sent back to the States for repairs and refitting. McCain requested transfer to another carrier so he could stay in combat.
And of course, the last aircraft loss was when he was struck by an enemy missile during an attack run. Far from being a sign of poor piloting, McCain was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross because he stayed on his bomb run despite being ‘lit up’ by enemy radar.
The bottom line is that all the evidence we have is that, at least at first, McCain was probably a mediocre pilot (another indication of that is that he was put in attack planes, and not fighters where the best of the best tended to go). The Navy had lots of places to put the bad pilots, btw, without cashiering them. If he was a lousy pilot but not bad enough to kick out or kept in because of his Admiral daddy, he would have wound up as a co-pilot on a transport somewhere, or a flight engineer, or something like that.
In any event, it’s unfair bordering on a lie to keep repeating that he lost five planes because he was a lousy pilot. Only one of those accidents could be remotely attributable to pilot error, and we don’t even know that.
What those accidents do show is that McCain has a ton of courage. After having almost died in airplanes three times, he volunteered to go back to combat when he didn’t have to.
I do not believe that McCain’s accident record indicates that he was a poor pilot. Likewise, getting back in the saddle could just as well demonstrate foolish bravado or poor judgment as conclusively as courage. I don’t think his flight record says much one way or another, so I am inclined to consider it largely irrelevant. Personally, I am willing to accept that McCain was at least a reasonably competent soldier with a reasonably decorated record and leave it at that.
There are enough issues with his candidacy that dredging this sort of thing up dilutes what is truly important.
Informative post. I would say that he sounds like he was a good soldier.
I’d say that it’s been a long enough time that his soldierly record then probably has little relation to what sort of a president he’d be now.
Two people said this, Sam. That really doesn’t quite qualify as “you guys.” I and Maeglyn were neutral, pointing out that we thought McCain’s record was not indicative of favorable treatment.
Mostly I don’t see what any particular job has to do with being the president, except other political jobs.
In most cases soldiers don’t do things like this because of foolish bravado, poor judgment, or courage. There are a few that do, but most of us do it because it’s our job. There are numerous professions that have great risk, but rarely do we question people who are injured in those jobs why they continue to do them.
Does any part of this discussion deal with the question of McCain’s claim that he vetted all the controversial areas of Palin’s story prior to announcing her as his VP pick, yet he’s behind all the breaking news about her pregnant daughter, her bookbanning antics, her flipflops on the Bridge to Nowhere, her troopergate issues, etc.?
Seems to me if McCain had really vetted her half as carefully as he claims he did, he’d be issuing joint statements to defuse these things before they hit the news. His repeated reactions to these bombshells suggest either a very poor job of vetting, or a very poor job of releasing (or recognizing) potenially damaging and certainly controversial information. But it really can’t be true that he knew about all of these things well in advance but decided that he’d deal with them on an improvised basis when and if they became known. If that were true, he’d be deliberately doing his campaign unnecessary damage, and that’s one accusation I can’t make of him. He’s trying to win, but I can’t see how vetting her hastily or playing catch-up with fast-breaking news (that he was already informed about) helps him to win.
I believe you. But we don’t know whether or not McCain is “most soldiers”. If there are irregularities in his record, they should be questioned. But whether or not he was a good pilot or what going back into combat after his experiences says about his character is not very fruitful.
McCain may not be Eisenhower, but I don’t see an enormously compelling reason not to take his record at face value.
Who was going to fight him?
Is Palin evidence of McCain’s incompetence as an executive?
Not really? Speaking politically, she did something McCain couldn’t do and reached the evangelicals.
As for the rest, it’s damn hard to say. He certainly could’ve picked better more qualified candidates, but it’s too early to say that this is a sign of incompetence.