Fragen? Antworten! Siehe auch: Alternativlos
Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker." […]Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.Contraband ist Schmuggelware, vermutlich Zigaretten oder sowas. Und als Pilot war er offenbar wirklich eine Offenbarung in Inkompetenz.He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. […]McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout.
In seiner ganzen Karriere ist der nie durch Fähigkeiten vorwärts gekommen, sondern hat sich immer mit Beziehungen vorgemogelt. Wen würde man als Präsidenten haben wollen, wenn nicht so jemanden?On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.Bwahahahaha, sehr schön :-)Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."Nachvollziehbar? Keine Frage. Aber ein Held ist was anderes. Später haben sie ihm die Freilassung angeboten, und McCain hat abgelehnt und das ist heute das Zentrum seiner Heldengeschichte.What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."Später hat er dann übrigens noch ein drittes Flugzeug gecrasht, aber offenbar nicht während eines Krieges.Dann kümmert sich der Artikel noch um die ganzen schmierigen Lobbyisten- und Fundraising-Probleme, die Keating Five, die Drogenabhängigkeit seiner Frau und wie sie sich die Tabletten dann über eine Hilfsorganisation für die 3. Welt beschafft hat, … da bleibt kein gutes Haar übrig. Nicht, dass da vorher viele gewesen wären. Und am Ende steht die Beobachtung, dass er ein überzeugterer Neocon als Bush ist, und mindestens genau so ein Kriegstreiber.
By 1999, McCain was championing what he called "rogue state rollback." First on the hit list: Iraq.Privately, McCain brags that he was the "original neocon." And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Und so bleibt da nur ein rauchender Krater, wo eben noch McCain stand. (Danke, Ralf)