I am sure others have noted this article from Rolling Stone due to be published this week. It is by Tim Dickinson and is entitled Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty. It is really the bible for dismantling John McCain's carefully crafted autobiography. It is lenghty - 10 pages on the internet. But it re-weaves McCain's tale beginning in high school through to the present. It is a must read, must share, must discuss kind of a thing.
The question at this point in the game is what to make of this piece of journalism. There is no doubt, from the title to the first story on the opening page that this is going to be a bad trip for John McCain. The article starts out describing a reunion between two former POWs in 1974.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes.
Right off the bat, Dickinson begins to challenge John McCain's #1 storyline. He was a POW who served with the greatest honor of anyone in human history. But Dickinson introduces you right away to someone who shared McCain's same experience with even more honor. What an opening blow.
The article continues to take the reader through McCain's pampered, spoiled life as the son of a famous admiral even making a strking comparison between McCain and Bush... one we don't even talk about that much.
In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
This article is 10 pages long as I indicated before and I am still quoting from page 1, so I could easily blast all site rules if I keep going like this. Suffice it to say, this article doesn't get any better for Senator McCain. It describes his time as a POW and how it actually didn't change him as much as he'd like people to believe.
One thing that I have heard a little about here, but never really heard any details, was about how bad a pilot McCain really was. This article recounts the multiple times McCain crashed airplanes, often just because he was screwing around in practice. It talks about his life in the 70's as a womanizing, brown-noser trying to move up the ranks of power and privilege. It gets into his political career and spends some time really dredging up the Keating 5 scandal again. For this alone, this article is worth it. The McCain campaign would make you thing that he just made some innocent mistakes and really didn't do anything bad during that time - and was completely exonnerated. That story needs to be re-visted by the media so folks can truly decide what happened.
Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.
That's just quid 1 of the story, quid 2 which involves what McCain did for Keating takes up about an entire page of the article and can't be succinctly blockquoted here.
The last, and perhaps most damning part of this article is a pretty detailed account of the flip flopper that McCain has become. One paragraph in particular sums it up nicely (and I swear this is my last quote).
In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.
In fact, looking again... that's not even all of them described in the article. That's just a clearing house paragraph to cover everything else that Dickinson didn't have space to write about.
So, the question going forward is what to do with this article? I certainly say read it, share it, discuss it. With Obama looking to do just fine without bashing McCain (and McCain/Palin doing just fine bashing themselves), I'm not sure how big of a deal to make out of it. It clearly is an anti-McCain piece that the right will try to dismiss as biased and non-serious being from Rolling Stone. But it should lead to questions from more "serious" journalists. How many of these things in this piece are true? Because if even a fraction are, then McCain's maverick image is going to take an even larger hit!