Katherine Seelye has an article in the New York Times about John McCain’s debating style. The lede just struck me as goofy.
Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, heads into the first debate on Friday with a track record as a scrappy combatant and the instincts of a fighter pilot, prepared to take out his opponent and willing to take risks to do so.
It’s calls to mind bad Top Gun dialogue (but I repeat myself).
“John McCain is writing checks his body can’t cash!”
“That’s right Obama, *I’m dangerous!*”
But, the article suggests that McCain will return to his tried and true P.O.W. gambit — an experience we’ve been told he is reluctant to discuss . . . again and again and again.
In any event, I guess it’s good for Obama if McCain’s debate expectations are set relatively high. Then at least we won’t get the Bush standard where it was something like “Hey, look! He didn’t drool on himself! He’s a winner!”
If I were Obama, I’d be trying to paint McCain as that guy with anger management problems and a rictus grin.
He has the instincts of a fighter pilot, all right. A shitty fighter pilot who lost five planes in a fairly brief flying career.
His subpar fighter pilot instincts have also been seen in the first S&L disaster, as well as the current replay. Also, his happy trigger finger wanting to attack Iraq on 9/12/01.
Occasionally he flips from fighter pilot to bomber pilot, desiring to “bomb bomb bomb Iran heh heh”.
Sometimes his high risks yield high rewards, like when he abandoned his wingman, I mean wife, to rob the cash-filled cradle.
But usually, he’s just “Crash” McCain, firing, missing, and crashing.
T says:
Whoops… see Factcheck.org on this one.
Oops, four planes, plus one that clipped power lines due to pilot error/hotdogging but apparently didn’t crash. Two “engine failures”. Generally aircraft engines are very reliable. Strange that two engines failed in such a short career. We’ll give him a pass on the Forestal fire, I guess.
I feel so much better about his skills now.
The Factcheck.org story isn’t quite a debunking. He did sit in at least four planes that got removed from the inventory immediately after he last sat in them. Maybe five.
Oh, the irony. The powerlines he hit took out the power to a part of Spain. Recently in an interview, he seemed confused and left the impression that he thought Spain was in Latin America, or the western hemisphere, and that he might not want to meet with their leader. He should be more familiar with the country that played host to one of his McCrashes.
T, there are just so many real shots we can take at him I hate to see any efforts spent on the questionable ones.
Thanks, Brenda.
It was no effort at all, really.
But if someone is going to put forward the crap about “instincts of a fighter pilot”, I can’t help it if his poor luck at the controls comes to mind. It would be like if someone touted Lindsay Lohan’s debating skills by making references to skillful driving.
I’ll agree, it was a really stupid description.