http://dj-astellarlife.blogspot.com/2008/06/mccain-dumped-his-disfigured-first-wife.html Heres a nice Daily Mail article on McCain. It is in England so do not blame the Dems. They question his values and do not see much to recommend him He ran around a lot .
It is always the hypocrisy.
Yes… The hypocrisy. Like discovering now that a 25 year old affair is a horrible character flaw, but when Bill Clinton was fighting his ‘bimbo eruptions’, getting hummers in the Oval Office, and being sued for sexual misconduct, we were told that this is a completely private affair, nothing to see here, it has nothing to do with his ability to do a good job as President. When he went so far as to lie under oath in his sexual assault trial, we were told that it still had nothing to with his ability to be president, and that a person’s private life is private.
Of course, before Bill Clinton came along, the left argued that bosses who nailed their underlings were behaving unethically because it wasn’t really a consensual relation because of the power imbalance. But then when the most powerful man in the world nailed a young intern, everyone looked the other way and said it was a private matter between the two of them.
But that was then. Now you’ve got an old affair of McCain’s to dredge up, so suddenly cheating on the wife is a horrible character flaw that must be held in account when voting for president. What a surprise.
I’m not sure what you mean by “we were told it was private” etc.
That’s not quite how I remember it. What we were told is Clinton was a filthy disgusting scumbag who must be impeached, and he almost was, after months & years of some pretty hellacious vitriol and slobbering at the mouth and gnashing of teeth.
You make it sound like we were told it was no big deal so it wasn’t a big deal but that’s not how it was at all, and I think Hillary is out of the running at least in part because she’s the bitch who stood by her filthy, no good cheating husband. People remember hating her, though when asked they almost can’t remember now; they just remember hating her, and vowing to hate her forever.
That’s funny. I’ve had a similar experience with people who make a claim and then say “regards”.
Amaretto or Grand Marnier??? Yum yum, This is the spiked maccaroon recipe isn’t it? How generous can I be with the Grand Marnier?
Thanks for the correction, I was ten when that report came out. BTW, I’m not voting for him, but I still believe that he’s an honorable man that shouldn’t be ‘Swift Boated’
I understand that they’re called ‘zero/zero’ as in zero altitude and zero MPH.
They’re not supposed to kill the pilot.
Half a day late and a dollar-twenty short.* Plus the contention that McCain didn’t have one on his plane.
Anyway, welcome aboard.
*That’s calculating 60 posts at everybody’s $.02
McCain may have thought the matter over in peace for several days, but according to his own account and those of others there, when he gave the “wrong” answer to the North Vietnamese, they beat him severely for it.
So let’s not try to paper over what went down over there.
I have said before that a man’s veteran’s status really doesn’t matter in an election - but this has gone way past silly and is heading right into offensive.
I don’t think you can fairly call climbing out of the airplane a heroic act - even if that plane had a zero-zero ejection seat, most pilots didn’t trust them, and many would choose to try to land a crippled airplane rather than risk ejection. A lot of them died trying.
Back then, if the ejection didn’t kill you, you had a good chance of being kneecapped, or having spinal injuries from the explosive force of the ejection, or ejecting and coming down in front of the ship - or into the fire.
And finally, I don’t think it would have occurred to a typical pilot to attempt an ejection from an airplane sitting still on the ground like that. McCain probably just thought, “Jesus, I’d better get the hell out of dodge” and scrambled out as fast as he could. And since he did get out safely, it would seem he made a good judgment call.
However, just being a carrier pilot in combat back then was heroic. Hell, just landing on a carrier at night takes giant brass balls, let alone doing it in a war zone day in and day out with 60’s era technology. There are no cowards flying fighters off of carrier decks - even in peacetime.
Ok. Thanks for the info. I hope my questions were not viewed as hostile cite requests. 
Another possibilty to consider is that McCain’s aircraft was sitting amongst several others on the aft section of the flightdeck, all fully fueled, and most had pilots in them preparing for a strike mission. When the crap hit the fan, several wing mounted gas pods ruptured, spilling fuel all over the deck, which ignited.
I don’t know what McCain could see from his cockpit, but even if he had a zero-zero ejection seat, using it might not have been a good idea. An ejection seat uses rockets to fire the pilot away, and the rocket flames might ignite the fuel in and around McCain’s jet, further endangering the pilots in the aircraft near him.
I am not a pilot, so I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that pilots are told/trained not to eject from their aircraft when they are parked close together like that.
I missed the part where ‘everyone’ looked the other way. The whole freakin’ “liberal media” was outraged.
I realize you’re in Canada, Sam, so you may have missed this, but daily readers of the ‘liberal’ Washington Post sure didn’t.
The only debate was, was it grounds for impeachment? Remember the much-maligned MoveOn.org? It started life as “Censure and Move on.”
Let’s get back to its relevance, OK?
It doesn’t disqualify McCain for the Presidency in and of itself. What it does is undermine (decisively, IMHO) the claim that his immediately preceding experience in Vietnam somehow made him a man of character and integrity in other areas of his life.
If (generic) you want to vote for McCain because he’s better on the issues, that’s fine. If you want to vote for him because you think his recent political track record demonstrates character and integrity (yeh, riiiight!), then whatever. But McCain’s five years in the Hanoi Hilton say absolutely zero about his present character and integrity.
That is what his tawdry past says. That’s all I’m arguing it says: that was a long time ago, and people do grow and change. (Can’t speak for gonzomax, of course, but I’m gonna make you respond to stronger arguments than his if you want to do these comparisons.) But Vietnam was even longer ago, and McCain’s life in the wake of Vietnam clearly shows no carryover of character from that experience.
If Bill Clinton were to run for elective office again, I doubt that anyone would say, “vote for him because his Arkansas days demonstrate his character and integrity.” But if they did, I’d agree that that argument would have similarly been proven ludicrous.
No hostile cite request, that’s what we’re here for. I can’t say anything about currently, I can just say that at that time, pilots would, rule of thumb, be pretty sure that a zero/zero meant death.
Not to mention exploding something in the middle of a fire is probably not a great idea.
Cause he was dead center in the fire.
I thought this article was relevant to the thread.
I think Wes Clark accurately and honorably defended himself and his comments without backing down while Obama wisely distanced himself from the controversy.