McCain is mean

Reasons to agree

  • One of his main supporters calls himself the "Ankle Biting Pundit". Not exactly a place of thoughtful discussion of ideas. Mainly just name calling, ridicule, and self rightousness.
  • McCain said; "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?. Because Janet Reno is her father."
  • McCain has said, "You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who is still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it."
  • McCain holds grudges.
  • To an inattentive freelance photographer who happened to get between him and a Sunday-afternoon house-party crowd in New Hampshire: "My friend, I like to see people when I'm talking to them."
  • To a nervous technician taking too long to rig a wireless transmitter on McCain's back before a convocation at Boston College: "My friend, I will call you if I need you."
  • To Tim Russert on Meet the Press, after Russert has just told McCain that "to win the Republican primary you have to move to the right, and then, to win the general election, move back to the center": "People know me too well, my friend. I'm not moving any way."
  • In high school, his nicknames were "Punk" and "McNasty".
  • A survey of senior Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian magazine last summer ranked McCain second for "Hottest Temper" in the Senate, just behind the famously cranky 83-year-old Ted Stevens, of Alaska.
  • Twenty-five years ago, a rival in McCain's first congressional race called his first wife, Carol, to ask if she had any "negative material" on her ex-husband; McCain later told the man that if he ever did anything like that again "I will personally beat the shit out of you."
  • More recently, just last winter, McCain wrote a stinging letter—and made it public—to Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat and rising star, for what amounted to little more than a misunderstanding over how Obama intended to proceed on the issue of lobbying reform—something that could have been cleared up with a chat in the corridor. Instead, McCain let loose, writing Obama the kind of missive, lacerating in its sarcasm, that Harry Truman used to compose late at night, but then prudently put in a drawer: "I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere.… I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble."
  • McCain gets testy with a woman who says that her grandson and granddaughter have served in Iraq and that things there are going better than the American media say. "The situation is not improving," McCain says shortly. "There's no biased reporting in the number of casualties."
  • His favorite animal, he said, was the rat, "because they're cunning and they eat well." According to Torie Clarke


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