Thread: McCain Has no Morals OR Values

BE SURE AND READ THE 7 PARAGRAPHS IN GREEN LATER IN THIS THREAD.

Upon his return to the United States, McCain was reunited with his wife Carol, who had suffered her own crippling, near-death ordeal during his captivity, due to an automobile accident in December 1969 that left her facing months of operations and physical therapy;[50] by the time he saw her again she was four inches shorter, on crutches, and substantially heavier.[51]

As a returned POW, McCain became a celebrity of sorts: The New York Times ran a photo of him getting off the plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines; he published a long cover story describing his ordeal and his support for the Nixon administration's handling of the war in U.S. News & World Report;[39] he participated in several parades and personal appearances; and a photograph of him on crutches shaking the hand of President Richard Nixon at a White House reception for returning POWs became iconic.[50]

During the time in Jacksonville, the McCains' marriage began to falter.[53] McCain had extramarital affairs,[53] and he would later say, "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine."[53] His wife Carol would later echo those sentiments, saying "I attribute [the breakup of our marriage] more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do to anything else."[53]

In 1976, McCain briefly thought of running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida.[54] Instead, based upon the recommendation of Admiral James L. Holloway III,[50] in 1977 McCain became the Navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate.[54] Returning to the Washington, D.C. area, McCain soon became the leader of the Russell Senate Office Building liaison operation, and would later say it represented "[my] real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant."[50] McCain was influenced by senators of both parties, and especially by a strong bond with Republican Senator John Tower of Texas, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.[50] McCain was still living with his wife, although they had had one separation during this time.[51]

In 1979, while attending a military reception in Hawaii, McCain met and fell in love with Cindy Lou Hensley, 17 years his junior, a teacher from Phoenix, Arizona who was the daughter of James Willis Hensley, a wealthy Anheuser-Busch distributor and wife Marguerite Smith.[53]

By now it was clear that McCain's naval career was stalled; he would never be promoted to admiral as his grandfather and father had been.[51] McCain filed for and obtained an uncontested divorce from his wife Carol in Florida on April 2, 1980;[21] he gave her a generous settlement, including houses in Virginia and Florida and financial support for her ongoing medical treatments, and they would remain on good terms.[53] McCain and Hensley were married on May 17, 1980[15] in Phoenix, Arizona, with Senators William Cohen and Gary Hart as best man and groomsman.[53] McCain's children felt upset with him and did not attend the wedding,[51] but after several years they reconciled with him and Cindy.[51][23]

Living in Phoenix, McCain went to work for his new father-in-law Jim Hensley's large Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship as Vice President of Public Relations,[53] where he gained political support among the local business community,[54] meeting powerful figures such as banker Charles Keating, Jr., real estate developer Fife Symington III,[53] and newspaper publisher Darrow "Duke" Tully,[54] all the while looking for an electoral opportunity.[53]

When John Jacob Rhodes, Jr., the longtime Republican congressman from Arizona's 1st congressional district, announced his retirement, McCain ran for the seat as a Republican in 1982.[56] McCain faced two experienced state legislators in the Republican nomination process, and as a newcomer to the state was hit with repeated charges of being a carpetbagger.[53] Finally at a candidates forum he gave a famous refutation to a voter making the charge:

Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.[53] (McSHAME HAS APPARENTLY "USED" HIS POW TIME SINCE DAY ONE!!!!)

A Phoenix Gazette columnist would later label this "the most devastating response to a potentially troublesome political issue I've ever heard."[53] With the assistance of some local political endorsements and his Washington connections, as well as effective television advertising, partly financed by $167,000 that his wife lent to his campaign (which helped him outspend his opponents),[54] and with support of Tully's The Arizona Republic (the state's most powerful newspaper),[54] McCain won the highly contested primary election in September 1982.[53] By comparison, the general election two months later became an easy lopsided victory for him in the heavily Republican district.[53]

In 1989, he became a staunch defender of his friend John Tower's doomed nomination for U.S. Secretary of Defense; McCain butted heads with Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich — who was challenging Tower regarding alleged heavy drinking and extramarital affairs[70] — and thus began McCain's difficult relationship with the Christian right, as he would later write that Weyrich was "a pompous self-serving son of a bitch."[70]

Keating Five

McCain's upwards political trajectory was jolted when he became enmeshed in the Keating Five scandal of the 1980s. In the context of the Savings and Loan crisis of that decade, Charles Keating, Jr.'s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, a subsidiary of his American Continental Corporation, was insolvent due to some bad loans. In order to regain solvency, Lincoln sold investment in a real estate venture as a FDIC insured savings account. This caught the eye of federal regulators who were looking to shut it down. It is alleged that Keating contacted five senators to whom he made contributions. McCain was one of those senators and he met at least twice in 1987 with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, seeking to prevent the government's seizure of Lincoln. Between 1982 and 1987, McCain received approximately $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.[75] In addition, McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family and baby-sitter made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. After learning Keating was in trouble over Lincoln, McCain paid for the air trips totaling $13,433.[76]

Eventually the real estate venture failed, leaving many broke. Federal regulators ultimately filed a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating, accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and into political campaigns. The five senators came under investigation for attempting to influence the regulators. In the end, none of the senators were convicted of any crime, although McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising "poor judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating.[77] On his Keating Five experience, McCain said: "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."[77]

McCain survived the political scandal by, in part, becoming friendly with the political press;[78] with his blunt manner, he became a frequent guest on television news shows, especially once the 1991 Gulf War began and his military and POW experience became in demand.[78] McCain began campaigning against lobbyist money in politics from then on. His 1992 re-election campaign found his opposition split between Democratic community and civil rights activist Claire Sargent and impeached and removed former Governor Evan Mecham running as an independent.[78] Although Mecham garnered some hard-core conservative support, Sargent's campaign never gathered momentum and the Keating Five affair did not dominate discussion.[78][79] McCain again won handily,[78] getting 56 percent of the vote to Sargent's 32 percent and Mecham's 11 percent.

2001–2007

With no love lost between them, McCain began 2001 by breaking against the new George W. Bush administration on a number of matters.[130] In January 2001 the latest iteration of McCain-Feingold was introduced into the Senate; it was opposed by Bush and most of the Republican establishment,[130] but helped by the 2000 election results, it passed the Senate in one form until procedural obstacles delayed it again.[131] In these few months McCain also opposed Bush on an HMO reform bill, on climate change measures, and on gun legislation.[130] Then in May 2001, McCain voted against the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001,[132] Bush's $350 billion in tax breaks over 11 years, which became known as "the Bush tax cuts". He was one of only two Republicans to do so,[130] arguing that he would support the tax cut plan if they were tied to subsequent decreases in spending.[132] Then when Republican Senator Jim Jeffords became an Independent, throwing control of the Senate to Democrats, McCain defended him against "self-appointed enforcers of party loyalty."[130] Indeed, there was speculation at the time,[133] and in years since,[134] about McCain himself possibly leaving the Republican Party during the first half of 2001. Accounts have differed as to who initiated any discussions, and McCain has always adamantly denied, then and later, that he ever considered doing so.[130][134] In any case, all of this was enough for conservative Arizonan critics of McCain to organize rallies and recalls against him in May and June 2001.[130]

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, McCain became a supporter of Bush and an advocate for strong military measures against those responsible with respect to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan;[130] in a high-profile[130] late October 2001 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece he wrote, "America is under attack by a depraved, malevolent force that opposes our every interest and hates every value we hold dear." After advocating an overwhelming, not increment, approach against the Taliban in Afghanistan, including the use of ground forces, he concluded, "War is a miserable business. Let's get on with it."[135] He and Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman wrote the legislation that created the 9/11 Commission,[136] while he and Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings co-sponsored the Aviation and Transportation Security Act that federalized airport security under what became the Transportation Security Administration.[137]

McCain-Feingold had been yet further delayed by the effects of September 11.[131] Finally in March 2002, aided by the aftereffects of the Enron scandal, it passed both House and Senate and, known formally as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, was signed into law by President Bush.[130] Seven years in the making, it was McCain's greatest legislative achievement[130] and had become, in the words of one biographer, "one of the most famous pieces of federal legislation in modern American political history."[138]

Meanwhile, in discussions over proposed U.S. action against Iraq, McCain was a strong supporter of the Bush position, labeling Saddam Hussein "a megalomaniacal tyrant whose cruelty and offense to the norms of civilization are infamous."[130] Unequivocally stating that Iraq had substantial weapons of mass destruction, McCain stated that Iraq was "a clear and present danger to the United States of America."[130] Accordingly he voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002.[130] Both before and immediately after the Iraq War started in March 2003, McCain agreed with the Bush administration's assertions that the U.S. forces would be treated as liberators by most of the Iraqi people.[139]

In May 2003, McCain voted against the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, the second round of Bush tax cuts which served to extend and accelerate the first (which he had also voted against), saying it was unwise at a time of war.[132] By November 2003, after a trip to Iraq, McCain was publicly questioning Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq War, saying that "All of the trends are in the wrong direction" and that more U.S. troops were needed to handle the deteriorating situation in the Sunni Triangle.[140] By December 2004, McCain was bluntly announcing that he had lost confidence in Rumsfeld.[141]

In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, McCain was once again frequently mentioned for the vice-presidential slot, only this time as part of the Democratic ticket underneath nominee John Kerry.[142] [143] Kerry and McCain had been close since their work on the early 1990s Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, and the pairing was seen as having great allure to independent voters,[142] with polls seeming to confirm the notion.[143] In June 2004, it was reported that Kerry had informally offered the slot to McCain several times, but McCain had declined, either on grounds that it would be infeasible and weaken the presidency[143] or that the vice-presidency held no appeal for McCain.[142] McCain's office formally denied that any vice-presidential offer had taken place.[143] At the 2004 Republican National Convention, McCain enthusiastically supported Bush for re-election,[144] praising Bush's management of the War on Terror since the September 11 attacks.[144] At the same time, McCain defended Kerry by labeling the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry's Vietnam war record as "dishonest and dishonorable" and urging the Bush campaign to condemn it.[145] By August 2004, McCain had the best favorable-to-unfavorable rating (55 percent to 19 percent) of any national politician.[144]

McCain was himself up for re-election as Senator in 2004. There was some talk of Representative Jeff Flake mounting a Republican primary challenge against McCain;[141] Stephen Moore, president of the ideologically-oriented Club for Growth (which attempts to defeat those it considers Republican in Name Only), led talk for the prospect,[146] saying "Our members loathe John McCain."[147] Flake decided not to do it, later saying "I would have been whipped."[146] In the general election McCain had his biggest margin of victory yet, garnering 77 percent of the vote against little-known Democrat Stuart Starky, an eighth grade math teacher.[148] whom The Arizona Republic termed a "sacrificial lamb".[141] Exit polls showed that McCain even won a majority of the votes cast by Democrats.[149]

Following his 2000 presidential campaign, McCain became a frequent sight on entertainment programs in the television and film worlds, and even moreso after 2004.[141] He hosted the October 12, 2002, episode of Saturday Night Live, making him the third U.S. Senator after Paul Simon and George McGovern, to host the show. In the comedic news realm, he has been a regular guest on The Daily Show, and is a good friend of host Jon Stewart;[150] as of 2006 he had been on that show eleven times, more than anyone else. McCain appeared in slightly edgy bits on Late Night with Conan O'Brien,[151] and also appeared several times on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman.[152] McCain made a brief cameo on the television show 24 in 2006[152] and also made a cameo in the 2005 summer movie Wedding Crashers. In the more serious realm, a television film entitled Faith Of My Fathers, based on McCain's memoir of his experiences as a POW, aired on Memorial Day, 2005, on A&E.[153] McCain is also interviewed in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight by Eugene Jarecki.[154]

On judicial appointments, McCain was long a believer in judges who “would strictly interpret the Constitution,â€

He sure as heck won't get my vote. Its funny how much you learn about people when they are trying to get elected for public office and the presidency. No, this man is not fit to run the country or anything else for that matter.