I’ve never been a big fan of John McCain. I could never quite put my finger on why, but something always seemed a little off with him. When he ran in 2000, and some of his history beyond his being a POW started to come out, I thought I was reacting to his treatment of his first wife, and the tales about his temper. Turns out there was more, a lot more. And he is truly unfit to be the president and especially to be the Commander in Chief.
The article in tomorrow’s Rolling Stone details his less-than-stellar career before being shot down over Hanoi. At Annapolis, to which he was appointed as a legacy rather than because of his excellence, he seems to have been more interested in drinking and getting laid than in studying, which is reflected in his class rank: fifth from the bottom. Still, despite his poor performance he was accepted into pilot training and seems to have continued down the road he started on at the academy, concentrating more on what Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff called Drinkin’ and Drivin’ and Flyin" than on his NATOPS Manual. He downed two planes due to pilot error; he tended to stall on landing. If that weren’t enough, he diverged from his flight plan on a flight over Spain, and took down a power line, plunging part of a city into a blackout. You’d think that would get his wings of gold yanked—but no.
I suppose some of you are wondering why McCain didn’t get called on the carpet if he behaved the way h the article claims he did. The answer is simple: his Dad and grand-dad were admirals. Sometimes it’s who you know, not what you know. In one of my husband’s squadrons, the CO was a drunk. He arrived drunk to his own change of command ceremony—you could smell the alcohol three ranks down. He was such a notorious drunk that finally the other pilots refused to fly with him (P3s go up for 12 hours and carry two pilots for that reason; they are electronic birds used for surveillance and sub hunting). There were also rumors, but no hard proof, that he was sleeping around with some of the female crew. Fraternization and adultery are prosecutable under the UCMJ. Nothing happened to him. He was the son of an admiral and he was married to the daughter of another. Despite being a major fuck-up on many levels, he was sent to the Naval War College and promoted. I think something similar, along with his POW status, explains McCain.
Bad as his record was, that wasn’t what convinced me that McCain is unfit to be Commander in Chief.
When I read
Free Ride by David Brock and Paul Waldman did I realize what the problem was. There’s a passage in that book that sums it up perfectly.
In it, the authors are discussing the press being willing to forgive McCain’s occasional crude remark and impatience as the legacy of a salty old pilot. They bought into the Wings of Gold Myth, as if being able to land on a carrier makes everything else you do somehow okay. I admit, it takes balls of adamantium to land a plane on a moving postage stamp—but it also takes brains and precision. McCain has the first, but not the last two qualities. In the passage I refer to (and I apologize for not being able to quote it exactly, but I borrowed the book from the library and haven’t been able to get my hands on it since I returned it; this passage has kept me up nights for a couple of weeks), McCain told reporters that when he flew, he didn’t like to do pre-flight walk-arounds, going over each item on the checklist. He was too anxious to get into the air, and cut corners whenever possible because it was boring.
If you’ve never been on a flight deck of carrier, the real problem with that statement probably isn’t immediately apparent. Back in 88, I was fortunate enough to be able to watch flight ops on a dependents’ cruise. My husband spent the first 6 years of his 23 year Navy career on one as an avionics tech and troubleshooter with a couple of carrier-going squadrons. He did five cruises total. He wanted me to know exactly what he did before I married him.
At first glance, a flight deck looks like chaos in matching uniforms. People are moving around , pilots are being strapped into planes, and jets are taxing up tot the catapult to be launched. You quickly realize that nothing is random, that this is a highly choreographed, complex ballet where every participant is highly trained and must do his job perfectly—or people can and do die. The things that go wrong on a flight deck are myriad, from someone being blown overboard in a high wind to someone being sucked into a jet engine (it is not a pretty sight). Fires aren’t uncommon. Mistakes sometimes happen because crew work twelve hours days) seven days a week. Overtired people sometimes screw up, as do pilots. For this reason, there are redundancies built into the system to make certain mistakes are caught before they cost someone his life or his limbs. Repairs are re-checked by a second person before the aircraft is certified ready to fly. On deck, one of the flight crew does a walk-around to make sure all systems are working. This is before the pilot gets to the plane. He does his own pre-flight check to make certain. After all, you want to make damned sure that a pilot and an aircraft that costs more than what most Americans would make in 20 years are safely launched.
McCain’s attitude isn’t unusual. Pilots live to fly. Some of them, judging by what I saw when I dated a couple of pilots and went to the O club with them and the stories I’ve heard from a good friend whose O husband was a maintenance O in a squadron, seem to be permanently stuck in frat rat mode—like Maverick in Top Gun (and I think the press frequently forgets that that Maverick was a fictional character, and not John McCain). But even the wildest of them have common sense when it comes to their own safety. Those that don’t are reminded of why they need to do the "boring" stuff—often by senior enlisted men..
My husband once heard a crusty old MCPO tell a pilot, "With all due respect, sir, that isn’t your plane until the cat throws it into the air. While it’s on deck, it’s my plane. Procedure calls for you to do a pre-flight checklist, and I will not release that plane until you do."
Pre-flight checks save lives. Smart pilots know that. McCain doesn’t seem to have been a very smart pilot if he didn’t understand that. His record bears that out.
I want a president who will do his pre-flight walk-around. I want every "t" crossed and every "i" dotted before he makes crucial decisions, like whether or not to invade some country or to nuke Iran. I want someone who will read the reports and ask the hard questions of the experts, who will want to know the details, not just the highlights. I want someone who will want to be told the hard truths he doesn’t like by people who know more than he does and who won’t ignore those truths. I want a president who knows what he doesn’t know—and listens to experts on all sides on an issue. I want a president with a cool head who won’t act impulsively out of pique or a need to prove his manhood or a desire to best his father in accomplishments. I want a president who has firm control of his temper at all times. We’ve had 8 years of precisely that with George W. Bush, and they have been a disaster.
McCain is more of the same, and his military record proves it. He got away with it in the Navy because his status as an admiral’s son and grandson protected him. A mediocre officer at best before he was shot down over Hanoi, he screwed up and nothing happened.The problem is, McCain won’t have someone to bail him out if he screws up in the White House. Can we afford to take that risk?
I don’t think so.
Obama MUST win this election.