I so want this to be true

July 2, 2008 by lestro

by lestro

I love the idea of a younger John McCain yanking some dude out of his chair. It would almost give me reason to like the guy, assuming the cause of the outburst was justified…

One of John McCain’s Republican colleagues says he saw the presumed GOP presidential nominee roughly grab an associate of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and lift him out of his chair during a diplomatic mission to the Central American nation in 1987 […] “McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don’t know what attracted my attention,” [Thad] Cochran (R-Miss.) said in an interview with the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. “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 …”

Man, I’d love to know what that guy said to set off McCain, a guy with a temper that reportedly gets the better of him. This “Angry Johnny” schtick is nothing new, because back when he was running against Bush in 2000, Mac’s temper was also an issue, so much that the Washington Post and The Arizona Republic felt it necessary to bring up.

In a front page article and separate editorial Sunday, The Arizona Republic said it wanted the nation to know about the “volcanic” temper McCain has unleashed on several top state officials.

It’s apparently always been issue for Mac and something that we can’t help but discuss again during this race:

That temper has followed him throughout his life, McCain acknowledges. He recalls in his writings how, as a toddler, he sometimes held his breath and fainted during moments of fury. As the son of a naval officer who was on his way to becoming a four-star admiral, McCain found himself frequently uprooted and enrolled in new schools, where, as an underappreciated outsider, he developed “a little bit of a chip on my shoulder,” as he recalled this month. During a campaign stop at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, the most famous graduate of the Class of 1954 opened a window on what swirled inside him during his school years. “I was always the new kid and was accustomed to proving myself quickly at each new school as someone not to be challenged lightly,” he told students. “As a young man, I would respond aggressively and sometimes irresponsibly to anyone who I perceived to have questioned my sense of honor and self-respect. Those responses often got me in a fair amount of trouble earlier in life.”

He defied authority, ridiculed other students, sometimes fought. The nicknames hung on him at Episcopal mocked his hair-trigger feistiness: “Punk” and “McNasty.” Hoping to emulate his father and grandfather, also an admiral, he went on to the Naval Academy, where his pattern of unruliness and defiance continued, landing him near the bottom of his class. “I acted like a jerk,” McCain wrote of the period before he righted himself to become a naval aviator, a Vietnam POW and eventually a career politician.

It is tough to know what set him off during this alleged incident in Nicaragua, but we can, however, be reasonably assured that the dude did not call his wife a “cunt” or a a “trollup” since that type of stuff is A-OK with Johnny Mac.

But talk about a muscular foreign policy…