"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Monday, October 06, 2008

If McCain loses the "war hero" mantle, what does he have left?
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM
Much of John McCain's claim to the presidency has been his experience as a prisoner of war. Wesley Clark attempted, clumsily, to point out that being shot down and taken prisoner is not a qualification for the presidency. He was right, of course, but it was the wrong time for that message, with the media still in passionate manlove with McCain. There is a certain personal heroism in surviving hellish conditions, but by that definition, many of those held at Guantanamo Bay could be called heroes by people in their countries as well for surviving their captivity by the United States. Surviving captivity demonstrates a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, but it does not by itself constitute heroism in war. And yet, John McCain has been able to get away with claiming the presidency is his due because he was captured by the enemy in Vietnam.

Until now.

Wesley Clark won himself a banishment from the Democratic National Convention for pointing this out, but perhaps now the time is right, and the Los Angeles Times is noting aspects about McCain's war experience other than his captivity:
John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.

McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.

The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.

The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.

In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.

After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.

As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit.

The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.

In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out.

"Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"

Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: "That's a lot. You don't want any. Maybe he was just unlucky."

Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain's deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying. The results of the review would have been confidential.

The Times asked McCain's campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate's possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents. The campaign said it would have no comment.


If John McCain was shot down because he took undue risks and was cocky and reckless, that kind of changes the war hero meme and turns him into the kind of impulsive hothead who shows bad judgment that we see today.

Labels:

8 comments
Bookmark and Share
8 Comments:
Blogger merlallen said...
Any none son of an Admiral would have been kicked out of aviation.
Maybe they would have been allowed to be refuelers, but not aviators.
10/6/08, 7:12 AM  
Blogger Bitty said...
It's all falling into place for me now. McCain IS a Maverick -- the Maverick of Top Gun, who flies on ego and emotions and takes outsized risks -- but without any actual flying skills.
10/6/08, 10:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Whatever else one can say about George W. Bush, he was a far better pilot than John McCain.
10/6/08, 12:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Just getting in to Aviation -- especially as a pilot -- with his Academy record [5th from bottom!] took serious intervention from his father, if not Grandfather.

STAYING in [Given his record, I'm sure someone was watching his flying activities carefully] doubtless required even more interventions.

I'm truly surprised that some members of his squadron haven't come forward with [true!] tales of his activites. Seems like an absolutely ideal "swiftboat" [but in this case all true!] situation.
But alas! where are they all....
10/6/08, 1:02 PM  
Blogger Charles D said...
We might want to remind voters that we've been down this road before:

Playboy son of important father gets into college on connections rather than merit. Spends college partying and drinking and ends up with lousy grades. Gets into prestigious graduate school (flight school in McCain's case) even though would normally be rejected because of father's connections. Doesn't do much better there either.

And Obama is the elitist?
10/6/08, 1:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
@bitty .. haha.. thats awesome!

@joe hanes .. how do you know this? did you fly with him?

@democracy lover .. to true.. to true.. just because a man is confident in himself does not in anyway make him an elitist. that is probably the one thing that bothers me the most about this election
10/6/08, 1:51 PM  
Blogger Bob said...
I'm not keen on using this information in any large way; just put it out there. But bringing the Keating Five scandal back into public consciousness is a good idea. Hardly anyone understands it, it's enough to make it clear that it happened & was real. Gotta connect McCain to the banks. Barack has to stay on message, & a big part of his message is attitude & poise. There's a good chance that Repugs tactics will backfire; they look desperate, to sling the shit they have to ignore the headlines everyone is reading.
10/6/08, 4:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
You may want to check out my blog today which links to a RollingStone article that is lengthy but lays out all this and more about McCain. It really destroys a lot of the common myths about the man. Even the idea that he turned out early release by the Vietnamese. Turns out that that was nothing special either, but was offered to most captured GI's, and most of them turned it down. To accept it courted a court-martial upon return home it seems.
10/6/08, 4:56 PM  
Post a Comment
<< Home