Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts

July 8, 2008

How to win at games of chance

Time Magazine has an article on how John McCain, no surprise, loves to roll the dice in casinos, while Barack Obama played poker every Wednesday night in Springfield with other legislators and lobbyists. Most nights Obama won.

In fact, that would have to be just about my number one tip on how to win at gambling: Be a state legislator and play poker against lobbyists.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 3, 2008

McCain in Colombia

Why is John McCain in Colombia? The most reassuring theory I can come up with is that McCain intends to bring back a couple of sixty pound suitcases that the Secret Service will hustle for him through Customs. And soon Obama's big lead in campaign finance will have vanished. And there won't be anymore questions about McCain being too old to have the energy for the job as he starts campaigning 96 hours straight.

On the other hand, there are more alarming interpretations, such as that McCain is taking a serious interest in the geopolitical situation in Northern South America -- i.e., he wants to get us involved in a war there.

July 1, 2008

Can McCain look less old the Hillary way?

Hillary Clinton's campaign wasn't very interesting, but one question I haven't seen discussed is a detailed look at the regimen of plastic surgery, hormone supplements, Botox, make-up and/or whatever it was that had her looking quite presentable at age 60. She came pretty close to hitting the ideal midpoint between authentic and Desperate Housewifey.

I notice that John McCain has spent some time recently with the man who is perhaps his most valuable supporter, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. What do you think they talked about? Global warming? Health care finance reform? Perhaps, but, I dunno, I just have this sneaking suspicion that Arnold had some tips for his man on some amenable doctors in Brentwood who would write John prescriptions for human growth hormone and testosterone that would have him looking years younger in no time.

Personally, I don't think McCain needs any more testosterone than he already has.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 26, 2008

McCain's Intelligence Intelligence

Philip Giraldi, the ex-CIA man who writes The American Conservative's invaluable gossip column, Deep Background, notes in the June 16th issue:

Intelligence analysts who have briefed Sen. John McCain on international issues generally report that he is not very knowledgeable about most parts of the world, despite his years of experience in government and his campaign's insistence that one of his principal strengths is foreign-policy expertise. When speaking with an area specialist or expert, McCain is primarily interested in stating his own perceptions and is not generally regarded as an attentive listener. Analysts do not like briefing him because he becomes angry and sometimes personally offensive when someone contradicts his view.

It's really not very hard at all for an important personage wrapped in the glamor of power to persuade lower ranking outsiders that he's a deep thinker. Obama is the master of it -- all you do is tell the person how much you value all the time they've put into developing their expertise (implying that you are very busy yourself on so many other important issues), nod attentively as they drone on, then bring up one or two semi-sophisticated questions you had your staff dream up for you ahead of time, and then finally summarize back for them what they just said with an appreciative hint of wonder in your voice implying that the scales are falling from your eyes. The flunkies will go away and tell everybody that you are the new Pericles. But Yosemite John can't bring himself to do even that.

One analyst stated that McCain's alleged expertise on international issues is essentially bogus. He speaks no foreign language, and his international experience [prior to Congress] derives from brief postings at military bases, junkets while serving as Navy liaison to the Senate, and the misfortune of his rather more extensive stay in the Hanoi Hilton.

As a Congressman, McCain served on committees dealing with Department of Interior issues, Indian affairs, and the problems of aging -- all areas of particular interest to his Arizona constituents. As a senator, he has served on the three committees dealing with the armed services, Indian affairs, and commerce. ...

According to the analysts who have interacted with McCain, his recent misstatements about various Muslim groups and other foreign-policy issues are not slips. They reflect a real lack of interest in other countries that makes it impossible for him to empathize with their problems...

McCain, whose foreign-policy advisers are exclusively neocons, receives regular briefings from the distinguished scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, which are presumably more to his taste than the less colorful information provided by the $42 billion per year intelligence community.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 3, 2008

It's not plagiarism if I attribute it

From Craptocracy:

While Hillary Clinton’s grossly mismanaged campaign is now being dissected, not mentioned is how her bungled strategy was the consequence of stereotypes.

She and her brain trust assumed she would win at least some of the black vote; thinking blacks might put race first is not a thought liberals allow themselves to have. They also assumed white voters in caucus states like Idaho and North Dakota were bigots who would never vote for a black man, so she didn’t compete enough in those places.

and

When McCain talks about 'climate change' he seems desperate and grasping, like he doesn’t really care about it one way or the other. It’s as if he’s saying, “I’ll give you your global warming, just let me get my hands on some bombs. Just let me get my hands on some bombs and I will agree to whatever you want that doesn’t involve not bombing.”

Meanwhile, Udolpho resurfaces to announce he has a life.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 18, 2008

Darfur v. Zimbabwe: Is U.S. Foreign Policy Just an Elite Plaything?

In my new VDARE.com column, I compare the interest level in two African disasters of equal lack of strategic important to the American national interest:

Obama has, however, done a nimble job of exciting the Stuff White People Like crowd by repeatedly acting as if he cares about Darfur, a god-forsaken expanse of arid grassland just south of the Sahara in western Sudan, where militias backed by the "Arab" central government in Khartoum have been attacking locals.

Darfur has become a cause célèbre among celebrities such as George Clooney and Matt Damon. Obama has been addressing fashionable Darfur rallies and hiring foreign policy advisers, such as Samantha Power, who are passionate about America getting involved in this huge bit of damn-all in the middle of nowhere.

Darfur’s usefulness as a foreign policy issue to Obama and McCain in appealing to the SWPL contingent is it’s utter uselessness—America has no national interest in Darfur whatsoever, so therefore, the thinking goes, we should get involved because it wouldn’t do us any good—thus demonstrating the purity of our intentions.

In contrast, virtually no celebrities have expressed any interest in "raising awareness" about Zimbabwe, a verdant country at a pleasant altitude in southeast Africa. Over the last decade, dictator Robert Mugabe has destroyed the economy and driven his subjects to the brink of starvation. As with Darfur, the U.S. has negligible national interest in Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, in contrast to Darfur, Zimbabwe doesn’t interest the partisans of purity because of the unfortunate details behind why it is now prostrate: In 2000, Mugabe unleashed his goons to beat up and steal the farms of the efficient white farmers who raised most of the food.

Several members of Barack Obama's inner circle of foreign policy advisers are leaders in the movement to demand we do something about Darfur. For example, in a 2006 Washington Post op-ed entitled "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" ...

Similarly, in an interview entitled "The McCain Doctrines" with Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine [May 18, 2008], John McCain volunteers that he's often thought about starting a war with Sudan, if only a way could be found to make it practical:

"I asked McCain if it was true … that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. ‘I think so, I think so,’ he said, nodding. 'And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?' He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. 'You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up. … And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?'"

Note that, although McCain likes military adventures, the simpler task of intervening in Zimbabwe to avert famine does not appeal to him at all. While McCain volunteered Darfur, the NYT’s Bai has to bring Zimbabwe up:

"Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election?"

McCain tries to spell it out euphemistically for the journalist why a white President of the United States is not going to depose a black tyrant who wrecked his country by persecuting productive whites:

"'I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,' McCain said thoughtfully."

Well, not that thoughtfully—the U.S. doesn't actually have much of a history in Africa.

McCain notices his mistake and tries to make himself clear without actually mentioning the W-word:

"Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa.'"

... What makes Zimbabwe so unsexy compared to Darfur is that in 1965 the British Colonial Office tried to give the colony of Rhodesia to its black majority. But its white population declared independence and for 15 years resisted an international trade embargo, building a substantial manufacturing base. Finally, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher organized the handover of the country to Robert Mugabe.

The new President devoted the next decade to slaughtering his tribal enemies, largely leaving the white farmers alone to feed the country. In 2000, however, Mugabe began to reward his supporters by telling them to drive out the white minority and steal their land. Not surprisingly, his bully boys proved to be worthless farmers and the country has teetered on the brink of starvation ever since. Mugabe's government has responded to the shortages it created by printing money, driving the annual inflation rate up to 165,000% in April 2008.

Since 2000, Mugabe has clung to power through three elections due to the support of the black South African government, which provides him with cheap electricity. ...

In contrast to Zimbabwe’s famous role in the defeat of European white rule, Sudan is a member of the Arab League and the government espouses fundamentalist Islam, so it lacks the black cred of Zimbabwe. Granted, Sudan's leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir's complexion isn't much fairer than that of the typical member of the Congressional Black Caucus. But that little detail gets lost in most of the Darfur coverage. ...

So, the racial taboos about criticizing blacks don't apply as much to the Sudanese Arabs. In the American politician's mind, they're just white people, more or less. But some of them are misled by anti-Semitism or Islamofascism or anti-Americanism, just like the Germans were misled by Nazism, So, it's okay to kill them. (Indeed, for neoconservative Darfur enthusiasts, killing Arabs is not a bug, it’s a feature.)

But killing Mugabe's goons? They're black. And they beat up white farmers. Oh, man, that's a whole different kettle of fish—lots of domestic political implications that nobody wants to touch. So few white American politicians are excited about getting involved on the side of whites being victimized by blacks. There's no domestic political profit in that!

To a white American politician like McCain, Zimbabwe is the Jena Six brouhaha writ large. As you may recall, the six star football players on the Jena H.S. team had been using their privileged position as local sports heroes to run amok for years, beating up people. But their coaches and fans kept getting them out of trouble so they could continue to star on the Jena H.S. football team.

Finally, the Six went too far when they kept stomping a single youth after he was already unconscious on the ground.

So, just like in Zimbabwe, you had a gang of black thugs outnumbering and beating up a white person. What was the upshot? Why Rev. Jesse and Rev. Al and all the media came to town and denounced the white people of Jena for their horrible racism!

It was hilarious, but you can see why even a war-lover like McCain wouldn't want to get involved in such a directly analogous situation in Zimbabwe.

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 25, 2008

McCain as Paris Hilton, Obama as Daniel Day-Lewis

John McCain spent the week campaigning in poor black neighborhoods. Is this part of some complex master Rovian plan to switch the demographic balance of the election? Nah. Or is it part of a cynical "Message: I Care" ploy? Nah, too. Or does McCain really care about poor blacks? Nah, three.

McCain's pretty much broke, so he's running a Reality TV-style campaign where instead of paying for expensive speechwriters and TV ads, he just figures out some wacky situation that will attract more cameras than normal and he just wings it in from there. This week's McCain campaign jaunt was like that Paris Hilton reality show "The Simple Life" where she and Nicole Richie milked cows.

McCain's been winging it his whole life. That's what he's best at. He may lose a wing now and then, but he's still here.

In contrast, Obama's preferred mode of campaigning is the way Daniel Day-Lewis makes movies: as infrequently and monumentally as possible. Obama's 5000 word speech on Rev. Wright was the political equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in "There Will Be Blood."

In fact, what a lot of people said to each other right after Obama's Rev. Wright speech was awfully similar to what they said as they were walking up the theater aisle from "There Will Be Blood," with Brahms' Violin Concerto blasting away behind them:

"Magnificent!"

"He makes a shiver run down my leg!"

"Like Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane!' / Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address!'"

"He's so much better than all other actors / politicians!"

"By the way" [in a small voice, looking around to make sure nobody else in the crowd is paying attention], what the hell was that about?"

"Uh ... I dunno."

"You don't know either?

"Well, it was about this minister."

"But what about the minister?"

"Yeah, well, Day-Lewis / Obama hates / loves the minister. And he gets rid of / doesn't get rid of the minister."

"How come?"

"I ... don't know. It had something to do with religion. But, it didn't seem to come up much in the movie / speech."

"So, why are we raving about it?"

"Look, making sense isn't really the point, now is it? The point is that Daniel Day-Lewis / Barack Obama is the most amazing person in the whole world."

"Right, sorry, my mistake, never mind."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 17, 2008

McCain's reported IQ

UPDATE: If you are interested in learning the IQs and SAT scores of recent Presidents and candidates (and who isn't), I discuss them on pp. 127-130 of my new book, America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's Story of Race and Inheritance, which you can read online here:

http://www.vdare.com/half-blood_prince/half-blood_prince.pdf

Now back to my specific posting on John McCain:

When John McCain was released by the North Vietnamese in 1973, he began to participate in a series of psychiatric and medical exams by U.S. doctors, the American Ex-Prisoners of War study, that went on for two decades. In late 1999, he let several news organizations paw through a big stack of his records from this project (with some parts redacted, which apparently referred to his first marriage).

Does anybody know if these (and other military) records of McCain's are online anywhere? The news reports from 1999 make it sound like he just let some of his (favorite?) reporters read through them to summarize, rather than release them to the public.

In 2004, John Kerry posted a whole bunch of his military papers online, from which I was able to figure out how his performance on his military officer aptitude test compared to George W. Bush's on a similar test: a little lower (just as Kerry's GPA at Yale was revealed, after the election, to be slightly lower than Bush's GPA at Yale). Kerry's documents were scanned images of papers, so they weren't Googleable. I didn't find out about Kerry's documents until the fall of 2004, so I imagine it's unlikely that McCain has posted much yet.

The military shrinks gave McCain good marks for mental stability. The main bad-sounding thing that anybody published (other than one embarrassing medical condition) is that he has a "histrionic pattern of personality adjustment" (i.e., he's a big drama queen), but probably anybody who wants to campaign for President is kind of like that.

They tested his IQ twice. I can only find the second (and presumably higher) result. Time wrote in 1999:

Included in the records is a 1984 IQ test. His score, 133, would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history.

How exactly Time would know that 133 "would rank him among the most intelligent Presidents in history" is not explained. The only known tested IQ is JFK's (which was in the 115-120 range at prep school). I'd long heard that Nixon scored 143; when I tried to verify it a couple of years ago, I found lots of webpages saying that Nixon's IQ was 143, but all their supporting links pointed to a 1999 article by ... me. And I've forgotten where I got that figure. (I would guess I got it from the late historian Jim Chapin, who would certainly be a reliable source, but I don't know for sure where I got it.)

UPDATE: The ever-helpful James Fulford of VDARE.com tracks down the Nixon 143 figure to a 1991 Fortune magazine article by my friend Dan Seligman:

"The IQs of those who rise to the top are hard to come by, mainly because most such folks are shy about their scores. Not shy was Spiro Agnew, who arranged a luncheon with the editors of Time after the magazine said he was unqualified to be President, and there made the point that his IQ was 130. Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 when he was in Fullerton High School in California. Kennedy biographer Thomas C. Reeves tells us JFK tested at 119 just before entering Choate Academy. That last figure looks low. Might there have been some kind of testing error? The ''standard error'' for the Otis test -- the one taken by both future Presidents -- was six IQ points. That means there are two chances out of three that the true IQ is within six points of the reported score. So maybe Jack really was entitled to 125. But then maybe Nixon was worth 149. The only gangster whose IQ we have come across is John Gotti, who weighed in at 110 when tested at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, an institution in which he did not linger overlong."

All these reports on McCain sound pretty good, but there aren't any records from other POWs to compare them to in order to tell whether the POWs' examining doctors were playing it straight or were accentuating the positive.

Also, IQs are adjusted for age, so a 100 is the average for your age group, with the highest raw scores being attained as a young adult and then a long downward drift that often accelerates past 65 or 70.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 11, 2008

McCain's strategy

John Dickerson in Slate sums up what the GOP strategy will be against Obama:

"The GOP's attack will boil down to the accusation that Obama is a big phony."

I presume I was the first person to point out in detail that Obama's campaign themes, which are based on common assumptions about the political implications of his life story, are contradicted by his actual life story. And two months ago I explained how McCain could use this.

So, does that make it my fault if McCain gets elected and blows up the world?

Perhaps.

But, it's not as if nobody in the GOP would have noticed if I hadn't been hollering about it for so long. I just hastened the process.

It's actually to Obama's advantage that the GOP has figured out their strategy so early. It gives him seven months to figure out a counter-strategy, such as, to pick an unlikely example, to stop being a big phony.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 18, 2008

McCain Untethered

Dennis Dale explains John McCain's Media Magic:

I'll give [McCain] this much: he's figured it out. To get the press on your side, humor the bastards night and day. Flatter them. Give them 'access' and they'll love you for it so much they won't ask you any tough questions. Give 'em access and they'll do nothing with it, lest they lose it. Brilliant.

That's the trick Tom Cruise's old PR agent, Pat Kingsley, figured out as well. Tom's just about the hardest-working man in show biz, so she gave the media outlets a deal: they could have tons of Tom's time, as long as they didn't ask him any interesting questions ("So, Tom, what's the deal with this moon man religion of yours? Has the space monkey cult figured out some secret way to keep you from going gay?") If press did ask him something besides whether he does all his own stunts or just 99% of them, they'd not only lose all access to Tom, but to the rest of Kingsley's stable of clients. It worked for years, and then he fired her and put his sister in charge. You've seen the results.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 3, 2008

Why we love John McCain

At his Citizen Lobbyist blog, Craig Nelsen recalls:

During the 2000 primary season, I made it a point to ask each presidential candidate in person the following question at least once:

Current immigration policy is doubling US population within the lifetimes of today’s children. Since you support this policy, will you at least say when we should stop?

One billion people? Two billion? Three? ...

Vice President Al Gore’s campaign event in New Hampshire was tightly controlled. It required a bit of creativity even to get in. There was no question and answer period, so I had to shout out my question as Gore was striding off the stage. He froze. He turned. He strode back to the podium. A hush fell over the auditorium as the vice president leaned into the microphone. With his Tennessee accent booming out over the loudspeakers, Al Gore said, and he said it firmly, "Diversity is our strength." And the crowd went nuts. They cheered wildly as he marched triumphantly off stage and back to his waiting limousine. The Secret Service collared me, holding me at the auditorium exit while the Gore campaign decided whether to have me arrested. As the audience members filed out, a few shot me dirty looks, but not a single person commented on the fact that I was being detained by guys with guns for participating in my democracy without permission. Live Free or Die, my ass. ...

I caught up with the Straight Talk Express in Darlington, SC. McCain finished his stump speech and said he’d take some questions.

My hand shot up. He pointed to me. I stood up and asked [my standard question]...

McCain’s eyes narrowed, and his head drew down into his shoulders. “You and I, sir,” he began slowly, emphasizing each word and glaring at me as if I were a poisonous insect, “obviously have differing views on immigration.

"But let me make one thing perfectly clear," he continued, his voice rising, "there is no room in the Republican Party for bigots, xenophobes, or racists."

I’ll say this for South Carolina Republicans as compared to New Hampshire Democrats: no one applauded McCain.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 27, 2008

The McCain Campaign Reality Show

From 1977-1981, the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers met three times in the World Series. The Dodgers were the masters of the old style of media handling where arguments within the organization were not leaked to the press, and the organization presented a bland, unified front (unless something completely uncoverupable happened like the 1978 locker room fistfight between stars Steve Garvey and Don Sutton over the old spitballer taunting the handsome firstbaseman over his wife's affair with songwriter Marvin Hamlisch).

In contrast, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson, and the other Yankees seemed to hash every disagreement out in the tabloids. As a youth at the time, this always struck me as unseemly, but the Yankees had hit upon the future of entertainment -- taking back office controversies public. By the 1980s, there were top disk jockeys, like Steve Dahl in Chicago, whose act largely consisted of on-air squabbling with station management. By the late 1990s, reality TV shows like Survivor and Big Brother became popular even though they consisted of little besides inside dirt on who was doing down whom.

Leon Hadar points to a Ryan Lizza New Yorker article that makes clear, without quite noticing it, that John McCain enjoys favorable press coverage because he runs his campaign as a sort of private reality show for the reporters important enough to be on the bus covering him:
"It is bracing to drop in on the McCain campaign after covering the overly managed productions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic candidates rarely speak to the travelling press. McCain not only packs his bus with reporters (whom he often greets with an affectionate “Hello, jerks!”) but talks until the room is filled with the awkward silence of journalists with no more questions. ... McCain and his aides openly discuss strategy, whether it’s Brooke Buchanan, McCain’s travelling press secretary, prepping him for a press conference (“ABC might ask about that”) or McCain discussing his targeting strategy for Tampa (“I thought we did a robo-call to tell people about Schwarzkopf”—referring to the endorsement by General Norman Schwarzkopf). ...

McCain’s open-access policy is partly strategic. After all, he is able to hammer talking points like any politician. (It’s not just his jokes that he repeats.) But, by engaging reporters in long, even substantive conversations, he also disarms them. The incentive to ask “gotcha” questions that feed the latest news cycle is greatly reduced, and the hours of exposure to McCain breed a relationship that inclines journalists to be more careful about describing the context of his statements.

This doesn't mean that reporters get anything important out of McCain about what he would actually do as President. He doesn't seem to say anything terribly interesting. He just gossips about horserace politics, like how much he hates Mitt Romney and how much he finds Ron Paul's supporters to be weird, and they find it fascinating.

Strikingly, the top-rated show of the decade, American Idol, follows the old-fashioned Dodger strategy. It completely ignores all the backstage conflicts among the performers and just shows them singing. Similarly, the Obama campaign keeps reporters away from both the candidate, and even his supporters, as much as possible: "The Obama campaign, like the Bush White House, prides itself on message discipline and tracks down leakers with a frightening intensity."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 15, 2008

What's the deal with McCain's face?

Readers have pointed out to me that there's this ... thing on McCain's left cheek, and have wondered whether his skin cancer has come back.

I'm hoping it's just scar tissue left over from one of his two earlier struggles with melanoma. When my six cycles of chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer were over in 1997, the CAT scan showed that where once had been the tumor, which had been the size of a Polish sausage, there was something still there a little smaller than one of those cocktail weiners you eat from toothpicks at receptions.

"Give me a couple more blasts of chemo, Doc! I'm tough, I can take it," I whimpered.

"No, don't worry about it, it could be just scar tissue," he said.

"How can I not worry about it?"

But, it was just scar tissue. (Knock on wood.)

Still, it would be nice if the media occasionally explained what that thing on the Presidential candidate's face was. They write so many zillion words about the Presidential election, but so few of them seem to have much bearing on obvious questions we should be asking candidates.

I suppose I could call up from Google Images, say, fifty pictures of McCain's face over the last seven years to do a statistically valid study of whether or not the thing is changing in size (or if it occasionally shifts to the right side of his face, like Marty Feldman's hump in "Young Frankenstein"), but that would require me to look at 50 pictures of McCain's face, so, to hell with it.

UPDATE: To be serious, the problem with the left side of his face apparently goes back to his nine-hour surgery after his 2000 campaign. Worried about cancer, the doctors took out a lot of lymph nodes and some muscle too.

Speaking of McCain's face, a reader writes:

And what is the deal with his cheeks? His face seems to have settled, like semi-melted jell-o, and he's got two little face love-handles bulging grossly, possibly anomalistically, to 3 and 9 o'clock. I write as an expert on jowls as mine form a perfect O-ring about my ever-diminishing head, as if I'm wearing a NASCAR tire.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 1, 2008

McCain's five lost planes -- only two his fault

A reader writes:

It's quite true that McCain lost five jets in military service. However, that doesn't prove he did anything wrong. However, a close reading of how he lost five planes tells a quite interesting story. For reasons that will become clear, the story is best told in reverse order.

5. On Oct. 26, 1967 John McCain was shot down over Vietnam and ended up as a POW in North Vietnam. It was his 23rd mission over North Vietnam.

[It's hard to remember these days, when we lose so very few jets in combat (because we developed around 1980 the technology to blind the enemy by knocking out his ground radar while we control the aerial battlefield from Airborne Warning and Control System jets almost over the horizon) that we lost 3,322 fixed-win aircraft in the Vietnam war, perhaps the majority due to enemy fire.]

4. On July 29, 1967 his plane was destroyed by a missile accidentally fired by another plane waiting to take off. He barely survived. 134 sailors died that day. There is no evidence that McCain did anything wrong. The videos of the fires and explosions are astonishing. The first fire crew was wiped out by a bomb explosion and was replaced by volunteers in seconds. Subsequent explosions wiped out the replacement firemen. Tragically, the volunteers didn’t know how to fight a carrier fire and made the situation worse.

3. In 1965, he lost a plane flying home from the Army-Navy game due to mechanical failure. This was very common at the time. I once met a Vietnam pilot who lost a Phantom due to oil pressure failure. I asked what the consequences were. He said that his commanding officer was upset for 10 minutes and he had to fill out a form.

2. He lost a plane after hitting power line over the Iberian Peninsula. Presumably pilot era.

1. As a student pilot he lost a plane in Corpus Christi bay while trying to land.

The last 3 losses do not reflect adversely on John McCain. How about the first two? I would question whether any aviator whose name wasn’t McCain would have survived losing a plane as a student and then hitting power lines.

See http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/cin_mccain_lost_five_u.htm

For some details. There are also a few books about McCain out there. See http://www.amazon.com/Nightingales-Song-Robert-Timberg/dp/0684826739

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer