DCFOUNTAIN.COM

On McCain’s national security judgment and rush to war with Iraq:

After 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein…A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that “we’ll do fine” in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, “The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.”…That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. “In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power,” they insisted, claiming that there was “no doubt” that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction “against the United States and its allies.”…In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be “fairly easy” with an “overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.”…Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset….Indeed, McCain’s neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party’s nominee.

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On McCain’s priorities during the catastrophic 1967 fire aboard the U.S.S. Forrestal, which began when a rocket accidentally struck McCain’s plane on the aircraft carrier’s flight deck:

After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the “ready room,” where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room’s closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck….The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier’s 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship…As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

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On McCain’s serial adultery and polygamous start to his second marriage:

In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they “cohabitated as husband and wife” for the first nine months of the affair. Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona….McCain’s friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans — with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year’s holidays — never forgave him.

(NOTE: The full story behind McCain’s four-week official head start on his second marriage was documented recently by the Washington Post.)

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