Tuh-Weet! Meghan McCain, Uncensored edition

By GottaLaff

MegMac gives us a series of Daddy-oriented Tweets:

Talked to my Dad earlier, I have the coolest parents in the whole world. Wish everyone knew my Dad like I do! He is so funny!!

I think its rock and roll my tweets make headlines, who knew people cared so much?

...my Dad is the most amazing person I've ever met and he is the coolest father. I'm lucky were so close! (my mom 2)

I'm just trying to be me but I get what your saying. My Dad told me to stop swearing so much on twitter today :-)

Seems someone has picked up her father's vocabulary.

Why was MegMac swearing enough for Daddy Dearest to reprimand her? Go here to find out. There were too many Tweets for me to grab between phone calls and blog posts, so luckily, Wonkette did all the hard work for me.

Joe McCain says Brother Gramm-pa won't be happy with him

By GottaLaff

I'm pointing and laughing at poor, foul-mouthed, impatient, volatile, impulsive ol' Joe:

He tells WTOP he'll write an apology to the 911 operator and to the Alexandria police. In the meantime, he stopping any campaign activities. He says his brother won't be happy about the incident.

Read the original post here.

VIDEO: Gramm-pa McTongue's anger mismanagement

By GottaLaff

How will IWRC* Palin be able to contradict this obvious proof of the theory of evolution (h/t: AMERICABlog):

At least now we can finally understand Gramm-pa's anger issues. He simply hasn't evolved yet:


*"In What Respect, Charlie?"

Will Gramm-pa McCain finally lose it?

By GottaLaff

And by "lose it", I mean his temper, as well as the election. First, we had Barack Obama telling Gramm-pa McCain to "say it to my face". Now we have Biden:

"All of the things they said about Barack Obama in the TV, on the TV, at their rallies, and now on YouTube ... John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him ... In my neighborhood, when you've got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him."

Now take a moment to savor what Josh Marshall has to say about that:

And if my take on the inner workings of McCain's mind at the moment is right that should simply unhinge him even more.

As if that were possible, but let's hope for the best... or the worst. Wink.

Gramm-pa McCain: "Don't touch me...Do you know who I am? Do you know who you're talking to?"

By GottaLaff

Remember my post, "Gramm-pa McCain's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Temper 101"? Apparently, I missed a doozy that Michael Kinsley describes in some detail, but his concern isn't limited to Gramm-pa's temper. It extends to his arrogance and recklessness:

It comes in an email from my friend Jeff Dearth, a media investment banker and former publisher of The New Republic. We also went to junior high and high school together in Michigan. He would not make this up. In 2005, Jeff attended a magazine industry conference at a casino hotel in Puerto Rico. (I was there, too, though not a witness to what follows.) The guest speaker was McCain. [...]

McCain’s game is craps. So is Jeff Dearth’s. Jeff was at the table when McCain showed up and happily made room for him. Apparently there is some kind of rule or tradition in craps that everyone’s hands are supposed to be above the table when the dice are about to be thrown. McCain—“very likely distracted by one of the many people who approached him that evening,” Jeff says charitably—apparently was violating this rule. A small middle-aged woman at the table, apparently a “regular,” reached out and pulled McCain’s arm away. I’ll let Jeff take over the story:

“McCain immediately turned to the woman and said between clenched teeth: ‘DON’T TOUCH ME.’ The woman started to explain...McCain interrupted her: ‘DON’T TOUCH ME,’ he repeated viciously. The woman again tried to explain. ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO?’ McCain continued, his voice rising and his hands now raised in the ‘bring it on’ position. He was red-faced. By this time all the action at the table had stopped. I was completely shocked. McCain had totally lost it, and in the space of about ten seconds. ‘Sir, you must be courteous to the other players at the table,’ the pit boss said to McCain. “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? ASK ANYBODY AROUND HERE WHO I AM.”

This being Puerto Rico, the pit boss might not have known McCain. But the senator continued in full fury—“DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO? DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”—and crisis was avoided only when Jeff offered to change places and stand between McCain and the woman who had touched his arm.

What is bothersome about this story, if it’s true, is only partly the explosive anger. More, it’s the arrogance. At the craps table, who cares who he is? And there’s the recklessness of such a performance in a casino full of journalists (unless McCain absolutely couldn’t control himself, which is even scarier). But this gamble paid off. Although there were published reports that McCain had gambled late into the night, which properly treated that matter as charming, this particular episode has gone unreported until now. [...]

Jeff Dearth is not an extreme partisan or an activist for either candidate. He supports Obama, in part because he is truly alarmed at the thought of the arrogant hothead he saw becoming president. (“I’d happily gamble with Senator McCain again,” he says, “but I definitely wouldn’t gamble on him.”)

As if that weren't enough, add this to the Volatile Gramm-pa stories:

Meanwhile, a former senior Bush administration official told Political Wire of at least three occasions where he saw McCain fly into a fit of rage, including one time when he got physical and actually push the person annoying him.

Joe Klein: "There is...a pent-up anger to McCain. He seems to be concentrating so hard on trying to stay calm that he doesn't have much energy left over to answer questions in a free and creative way. He is not the sort of person, in the end, that you want to invite into your living room for a four-to-eight-year stay."

And he calls Obama scary.

Gramm-pa McCain's Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very Bad Temper 101

By GottaLaff

I've posted about Gramm-pa McCain's temper often. But here we have Gramm-pa's Volatile Temper for Dummeez all in one post, courtesy of "Make-Believe Maverick", The Real McCain, and yours truly:

McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an "incompetent little shit." Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

Talk about a "short" temper. See what I did there? Didja catch that short joke? I wonder if he sits on telephone books when he goes to the Early Bird Special at Denny's. Moving on. This next part is the story our own Cliff Schecter broke in his book, The Real McCain:

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

They've tried everything they could to discredit Cliff. Aren't they an honest and transparent bunch? Now imagine what it would be like to have this person's finger on the Big Red Nuclear Button:

In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a "pompous self-serving son of a bitch" who "possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain." In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that "only an asshole would put together a budget like this."

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room." The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."

McCain's frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton's teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked. "Because her father is Janet Reno!"

I did an entire post on his vile, hostile, mysogenistic "sense of humor".

Let's not leave out one more instance of Gramm-pa's instability, via The Real McCain:

Two former reporters covering McCain, one who witnessed the following events and one who confirmed the facts provided by the first, relayed it to me as follows: In 2006, the Arizona Republican congressional delegation had a strategy meeting. McCain repeatedly addressed two new members, congressmen Trent Franks and Rick Renzi, as ‘boy.’ Finally, Renzi, a former college linebacker, rose from his chair and said to McCain, “You call me that one more time and I’ll kick your old ass.” McCain lunged at Renzi, punches were thrown, and the two had to be physically separated.

There you have it, all in one place. Consider this your own, personal WikiGramm-paTemperPedia.

George Will goes after McCain's "temperament"

Oooh doggies. McCain obviously tee'd off Will by threatening his bud Cox, and Will isn't letting bygones be bygones. Go read the whole thing, but here's a couple of tasty graphs. I love the comparison to the Queen of Hearts, someone needs to get photoshopping...

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential"

(snip)

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed? "

Harry Reid blasts John Sidney McCain on temper

By GottaLaff

Well, somebody has to:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had some of his harshest words yet for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Friday, suggesting his colleague lacks the temperament and judgment to be president. [...]

“Our dangerous world calls for leaders with sound judgment, not those with a temperament prone to recklessness,” Reid said. “Our country deserves more than token shifts and lip service to change. We need to take decisive action to reverse eight years of foreign policy mistakes. That’s exactly what Sen. Obama and Senate Democrats offer.” [...]

“The Republicans talk a lot about experience. When you’re the author, architect and enabler of eight years of devastating foreign policy mistakes, that’s not experience. It’s very bad judgment,” Reid said.

For more on his temper, go here and here.

VIDEO: Michael Dukakis rips John Sidney McCain for his temper

By GottaLaff


"He threw us out of his office."

The relevant segment begins at about 14:40.

Here's some background on his infamous volatility.

McCain's Prickly TIME Interview

Ooooh, is it starting to get to him? Read more at the link. Not that he has a temper or anything....

And so when TIME's James Carney and Michael Scherer were invited to the front of McCain's plane recently for an interview, they were ushered forward, past the curtain that now separates reporters from the candidate, past the sofa that was designed for his gabfests with the press and taken straight to the candidate's seat. McCain at first seemed happy enough to do the interview. But his mood quickly soured. The McCain on display in the 24-minute interview was prickly, at times abrasive, and determined not to stray off message. An excerpt:

What do you want voters to know coming out of the Republican Convention — about you, about your candidacy?
I'm prepared to be President of the United States, and I'll put my country first.

There's a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?
Read it in my books.

I've read your books.
No, I'm not going to define it.

But honor in politics?
I defined it in five books. Read my books.

Finally! Boxer, Durbin on McCain: Temper, temper

By GottaLaff

Back to what really matters:

John McCain’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate are zeroing in on his oft-discussed temper, questioning whether that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is too volatile to be commander in chief.

I think I'm hallucinating. Say that again?

In separate interviews with Politico Tuesday, both Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said they have seen McCain “explode.”

“He has a huge anger problem,” Boxer said. “And he never hid that….I have seen it happen on the Senate floor many, many times…He has exploded at me a couple times.”

Mmmm, yes!!! More, more... more...

Boxer said McCain has always apologized after the dust-ups. Nonethless, she insinuated that McCain’s temperament makes him unfit for the White House.

“It’s all well and good to apologize,” Boxer added, “but if you are in charge of that black box, I worry about that.”

Two points: One, she's spot on. Two, this is what abusers do. They abuse, they apologize, they charm... and then they abuse again.

Durbin noted McCain’s temper is “well documented,” saying that he had been on the receiving end of it for what he considered “minor things.”

“I was in a confrontation with him… and he was quick to explode,” said Durbin. “It simmered for a long time.”

He apparently suffers from PTSD, and at the very least, from a severe pyschological disorder called, what is it again? Oh yes. Completely Unchecked Nonrestrictive Temper, or C.U... never mind.

Boxer pointed out that many of McCain’s GOP colleagues have also spoken out about his volatility, highlighting an incident told to the Biloxi Sun Herald by Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.).

Cochran told the newspaper that he watched McCain get involved in a physical confrontation with a Nicaraguan government official during a 1987 trip there. According to Cochran, McCain grabbed the official by the shirt collar and “snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair.”

Gold.

John Sidney McCain: Stuck in the Sixties

By GottaLaff

Via

Okay, J Sid, let's make it about the past. Because when it comes to the past, you've got years and years and years of it.

McConfused running a contradictory, muddled campaign

By GottaLaff

Good lord, if this is what a maverick is, then Jon Lovitz's conflicted character Tommy Flanagan (see video) is a maverick:

Senator John McCain is so quick to pick up his gold-colored cellphone to solicit advice — from senators, campaign consultants, even the stray former deputy press secretary — that aides, concerned about his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard, have tried to cut back on the time he has to make calls.

Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart.

Yeah, I'd want him running the country.

Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.

Why, if I didn't know better, I'd say the candidate of hopeless is starting to sound a little like-- dun dun dun-n-n-- Hillary! Uh-oh, read on, it gets better:

[His campaign] offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.

While he avidly seeks advice and contrary opinions, he routinely resists basic political counseling, such as when aides pleaded with him not to campaign sitting on a horseshoe-shaped couch in the back of his bus because they feared it made him look like an old man rumbling around the country in an R.V. He refused.

What a maverick.

For now, Mr. McCain’s executive style looms as a potential obstacle to his hopes of getting to the White House. His campaign has been rocked by personnel changes and often well-publicized differences. And for all the efforts to maintain discipline, he continues to be plagued by misstatements and apparent gaffes as he at times bucks what his own campaign is trying to do.

What a bumbling, disorganized, confused leader he would make.

In recent weeks, Mr. Murphy and another former top aide, John Weaver, were critical of Mr. McCain’s advertisements attacking Mr. Obama. The two men privately urged Mr. Schmidt and Charlie Black, a senior adviser, to get off that course and spend as much time building up Mr. McCain as tearing down Mr. Obama, advice also offered by a member of Mr. McCain’s panel of outside advertising consultants, Alex Castellanos. They met stiff, angry resistance, several people familiar with the episode said.

Confused, mixed messages, angry resistance... yeah, that's the ticket.

John Sidney McTemper is contagious: Behind the Scenes at Fox edition

By GottaLaff

Hey kiddies! It's time for another edition of How McTemper's Campaign Reflects the Attitude of Their Boss:

Clearly not all reporters are enamored with John McCain's press operation.

Early Wednesday, the Fox affiliate in St. Louis posted video of an awkward, testy exchange between staff at the station and McCain's senior press aides -- Brooke Buchanan, the national press secretary, and Nicolle Wallace, the former White House communications director.

If McTemper were, by some miracle, to get elected, imagine how exchanges about delicate international matters would go between his people, or J Sid himself, and, say, Iran.

On second thought, don't. It'll give you nightmares.

H/t: Commenter Mainsailset

Obamination: Look for this nasty one to make the rounds

By GottaLaff

Of course, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza will be quoted everywhere. Cliff Schecter's story (in his book The Real McCain) about John Sidney McCain actually coming to blows with Senator Rick Renzi was virtually ignored.

Obama’s relations with some of his black colleagues from Chicago were dreadful from the beginning. On March 13, 1997, Obama introduced one of his first pieces of legislation, a modest bill to make a directory of community-college graduates available to local employers. There was a response from Rickey Hendon, a state senator from the West Side of Chicago who had been close to Alice Palmer. After Obama explained his bill, Hendon, who has dabbled in film and television work, earning him the nickname Hollywood, rose to ask a question, and the following exchange occurred:

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I’m having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill’s still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn’t paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn’t pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Not—not—basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don’t know what you’re doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won’t be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

Although the exchange was part of a longstanding tradition of hazing new legislators, the tensions between Hendon and Obama were real. On another occasion, Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in Hendon’s district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. “It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close,” Nottage told me. “I didn’t think anything good could come of that.”

Hendon told me, “He’s the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That’s when he came over to my desk.” Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, “I’m going to kick your ass!” Hendon said, “He said something like that.” He added that more details will appear in a book that he’s written, entitled “Black Enough, White Enough: The Obama Dilemma.”

I'm still not finished reading the whole, very lengthy article, but that's the segment that's being pushed. And reread the last sentence. The guy is writing a book, and in that book will be a quote that is inaccurate by the author's own admission.

By week's end, his version will be gospel.

John Sidney McCain's "C-word" makes it on to CSPAN

By GottaLaff

Somebody's calling Cliff a lefty liberal lying gossip monger. It must be hard to be such a professionally unprofessional rightie book critic, especially when Cliff's three sources were solid. But, you know, "unnamed sources" are never reliable. Just ask the corporate media whenever they print nearly any White House lie story. The piece in question begins by quoting a caller to CSPAN's Washington Journal. The caller repeated a story that Cliff broke in his book The Real McCain.

There are Internet rumors [Laffy Note: Again, 3 good sources do not a rumor make] abounding about an alleged 1992 episode in which John McCain used the word in an exchange with his wife. The rumor appears to have started with a passage from a book, The Real McCain, by Cliff Schecter who sets out to portray an angry man who is unfit to serve as President of the United States. Schecter is a blogger at the Huffington Post. The passage quotes anonymous sources in a hearsay portrayal of something that happened 16 years ago.

At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c---." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day.

There is no mention of this occurrence in any national news outlets [Laffy Note: McCain did all he could to suppress Cliff's book sales in the U.K., as you'll see below in an e-mail to Cliff from a major U.K. newspaper. Given that precedent, he most likely did the same thing here at home*], even though, according to Schecter the three anonymous sources were reporters. And the quote itself seems so preposterous; it is reminiscent of the Edward Klein creation regarding Hillary Clinton, in which he reported that Bill Clinton said he’d "raped" his wife.

The mainstream media have made it a point to disavow smears against Barack Obama. While the caller to Washington Journal was most likely repeating Internet rumors, it remains to be seen whether the anti-smear mantra will be so lavishly applied to McCain.

After all such an outburst fits nicely in the "short tempered, volatile" box into which the liberal media want to stuff McCain.

Yes, the left wing media, aka Cliff Schecter, is all about the indiscriminate, delusional partisan smearing of John "P.O.W." Sidney CanDoNoWrong. There hasn't been so much as Word One from the liberal press about Obama's "shift to the center" or his middle name, let alone how he and his wife are unpatriotic Muslim terrorists who hate their own country, right? It's all about the unrelenting discrediting of McCain, day in and day out. Why, the media have been all over that gambling story like Lieberman on J Sid.

*Cliff's story, via an e-mail to him from a newspaper that was going to promote his book. This is verbatim, except for a couple of edits for privacy purposes:

Hi Cliff,

As far as I know it is dead here, so feel free to talk to your people. I would prefer if you didn't reveal my name or publication, but you should know what happened. The reason for being this is that my editor would not be pleased.

I called McCain's people for comment. They told me that first that this was all off the record, that you were a super liberal with a hate streak, that you were known to make outlandish comments like this and that you were not a reliable source. Then they said that they would prefer that we didn't go with anything, just to protect the Senator's image from false information. Because this was just a crazy, gossipy piece of journalism anyway.

I then asked for a quote for the article, as my editor needed something from them. They said, "Well, I know you aren't going to like this" and with a little almost smirk from them:

"This book is just tabloid trash," said [...] a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign. "The fact that it is even being reported speaks to the sad state of journalism today."

I further asked if the Senator was going to pursue legal action for libel, and she said no, and would not cite a reason why. Well constructed comment from them if I ever heard one. Would make a lot of news editors reconsider.

Let me know if you need anything,

[E-mailer's name, major U.K. newspaper]

If you go here , you'll find a link to the video of the CSPAN Washington Journal caller in question. I couldn't get it to load, but Paddy could. She said it was hilarious. The fun starts at about 2:54:36.

John Sidney McCain hates me

By GottaLaff

John McCain, Town Hall Meeting, Merrimack, NH 12/29/07

I don't know what I could have possibly said or done to upset him.

Wait. Did he say, "We've got the cables?" He must have confused thems with the Internets.

McTeleprompter's "I do the cha-cha like a sissy girl" problem

By GottaLaff

Poor John Sidney McCrotchety. He has teleprompter issues. Actually, let's broaden that out a bit. He is a befuddled, often careless speaker in search of a Cyrano de Bergerac:

“I have set before the American people an energy plan, the Lex-eegton Project,” Mr. McCain said, drawing a quick breath and correcting himself. “The Lex-ing-ton Proj-ect,” he said slowly. “The Lexington Project,” he repeated. “Remember that name.”

In a town meeting in Cincinnati the next day, Mr. McCain would again slip up on the name of the Massachusetts town, where, he noted, “Americans asserted their independence once before.” He called it “the Lexiggdon Project” and twice tried to fix his error before flipping the name (“Project Lexington”) in subsequent references.

So many cringeworthy moments, so little time:

By his own admission, Mr. McCain is not a great orator. He is ill-suited to lecterns, which often dwarf his small stature, and he tends to sound as if he is reading his lines, not speaking them. His shortcomings have been accentuated in a two-man race, particularly because the other man — Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee — can often dazzle on stage. [...]

He is working to limit his verbal tangents and nonverbal tics. He is speaking less out of the sides of his mouth, which can produce a wiseguy twang reminiscent of the Penguin from the Batman stories, and he is relying less on his favorite semantic crutch — the phrase “my friends” — which he used repeatedly in his campaign appearances.

Who wouldn't want to listen to that? How unfortunate that his Big Republican Convention Speech Day will only come but once.

And then there's that persistent mean streak he can't seem to avoid:

Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said, “There’s a danger of sarcasm becoming nastiness, and McCain seems to be conscious of that line.”

And when he tries to rein in his hostility?

The more careful McCain, said by some to be overly scripted, has received some withering critiques. “His rhetorical style can best be described as ‘tired mayonnaise,’ ” the comedian Stephen Colbert declared on “The Colbert Report” before inviting viewers to enter the “Make McCain Exciting Challenge.”

Peter Spaulding, the chairman of Mr. McCain’s campaign in New Hampshire, said he recently saw a McCain speech on television that was “just atrocious.”

Uh-oh! Hostile alert!

He sheepishly volunteered that he received complaints after a recent Newsweek profile of his wife, Cindy, said that he sometimes referred to her alma mater, the University of Southern California, as the University of Spoiled Children. [...] (It is fortunate for Mr. McCain that there was no YouTube in the 1980s when he jokingly referred to the retirement community Leisure World as “Seizure World.”)

After those little potshots, the Lex-eegton Project doesn't look so bad any more.

Tucker Carlson: "I hope he grabbed that Sandinista official by the face and ground it into the desk"

By GottaLaff

Here's a segment from Dan Abrams' show, Verdict. There are a couple of segments to watch for. One is Tucker Carlson saying this, in regard to the McTemper story I posted previously:

"You've got to be kidding!" he laughed. "Knock it off! That's the dumbest thing I've heard in so long! ... I hope he grabbed that Sandinista official by the face and ground it into the desk. They were monsters! ... I think America wants a president with some backbone!"

Nice killer instinct, Tuck. Maybe McTemper should put you on the ticket.

The other features a clip from The Daily Show about the C-Word story that our own Cliff Schecter broke, including a prominent plug for Cliff's book, The Real McCain.

And there's a special bonus about the spending habits of the ultra-extravagant Cindy McMealTicket, the epitome of the word "elitist".

[Huffington Post editor Roy ] Sekoff agreed, saying, "The hypocrisy ... comes when Karl Rove tries to paint Barack Obama as a country club elitist. ... Cindy McCain is the real deal. ... This is not going to go over well with the American people."

So many McTemper stories, so few media outlets.

Republican Thad Cochran on McCain: "Erratic...hotheaded...worries me"

By GottaLaff

It's all okay now. Thad and J Sid are the best of friends... as long as Thaddy doesn't cross him:

Notably mild-mannered Republican Sen. Thad Cochran shocked many earlier this year with comments about John McCain's volatile temper. He has since mended fences with the GOP presidential nominee.

But as first reported at sunherald.com, Cochran told the Sun Herald he witnessed a confrontation between McCain and a Sandinista rebel decades ago in which McCain "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

John Sidney McCain: Abuse you can believe in.

[H]e said something that surprised many in a Boston Globe article in January about his longtime Senate colleague McCain.

"The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Cochran told the Globe. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

But they've made nice-nice since then. And by then, I mean:

But Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987.

Sweet, grandfatherly, straight-talkin', beer baron John Sidney McThatWasThenThisIsNow? Hostile?

"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

My friends, my dear friends... yikes.

What do Eyewitness Thaddy's people say nowadays?

"I think Sen. Cochran went into as much detail yesterday as is necessary to make the point that, though Sen. McCain has had problems with his temper, he has overcome them. Though Sen. Cochran saw the incident he described to you, decades have passed since then and he wanted to make the point that over the years he has seen Sen. McCain mature into an individual who is not only spirited and tenacious but also thoughtful and levelheaded..."

The news media endlessly cycles and recycles the Reverend Wright, flag pin, and "cling to guns" stories, but the "revered P.O.W. maverick's" disturbing and unpredictable history of violence gets a pass. Yeah, that's fair and balanced.

Imagine what the corporate media would say if that story had been about Barack Obama. Now imagine that unstable, spasmodic "hero" John Sidney McCain with his finger on The Button.

You can stop imagining now. You've been through enough.