So Many Things to Choose From

I recently saw someone refer to John McCain's penchant for flip flopping as taking the Straight Talk Express into a U Turn. I thought that was the perfect expression for McCain's political philosophy -- the U Turn Express.

However, there's also his tendency for serial misstatements of fact that deserves note. Among them are a few gems:

From Dispatches from the Culture Wars, McCain:Ignorant or Lying?:

My father, a lifelong Republican, called and left a message on my voicemail yesterday saying that McCain's reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling on habeas corpus and the Gitmo detainees had sealed any chance McCain had for getting his vote in November. And McCain's statement was so ridiculous that one has to wonder if he is really that ignorant of the law or if he was simply lying through his teeth. Here's what he said:

We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.

That may be the single dumbest thing said in this entire election so far.

And then there's Will Bunch's contribution, McCain: Most. Ironic. Comment. Ever:

John McCain said something that boggled my mind (easily done, I know) going into the weekend. In an interview with CNN, he said, according to the network, in a story headlined "McCain: Treat Our Wives with Respect":

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- Sen. John McCain said Friday that every candidate's wife "should be treated with respect, and if there's any disrespectful conduct on the part of anyone, those people should be rejected."

That's interesting, because according to THIS story about McCain's first wife Carol, whom he divorced shortly after McCain met his second wife Cindy at a party and 10 years after Carol McCain (a Philadelphia native, by the way) suffered a horrific auto accident....

* * * *

This article is headlined: "The wife John McCain callously left behind."

But McCain said I am supposed to reject anyone who didn't treat a candidate's wife with respect.

OK, consider it done, then!

Finally, Jeffrey Klein of the Huffington Post describes a John McCain who sounds more like the screw up, frat boy GWBush, rather than the great man of experience due to his military career. See McCain's Secret, Questionable Record. Although he wasn't able to use his family's contacts to avoid service like Bush, he was able to parlay his family's military connections to his advantage. Noting that stories that McCain would have received an admiral's star had he not left the Navy were undoubtedly false, Klein says:

From day one in the Navy, McCain screwed-up again and again, only to be forgiven because his father and grandfather were four-star admirals. McCain's sense of entitlement to privileged treatment bears an eerie resemblance to George W. Bush's.

Despite graduating in the bottom 1 percent of his Annapolis class, McCain was offered the most sought-after Navy assignment -- to become an aircraft carrier pilot. According to military historian John Karaagac, "'the Airdales,' the air wing of the Navy, acted and still do, as if unrivaled atop the naval pyramid. They acted as if they owned, not only the Navy, but the entire swath of blue water on the earth's surface." The most accomplished midshipmen compete furiously for the few carrier pilot openings. After four abysmal academic years at Annapolis distinguished only by his misdeeds and malfeasance, no one with a record resembling McCain's would have been offered such a prized career path. The justification for this and subsequent plum assignments should be documented in McCain's naval file.

That John McCain. He's a chip off the old Bush.