Former Republican presidential contender John McCain reunited with his onetime advisor Carly Fiorina on the campaign trail Saturday in San Diego, offering a blistering indictment of Barbara Boxer’s record on military issues and calling her the “most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today” — an assessment he said he’d made while having “the unpleasant experience” of serving with her.
“When you hear her say that she supports the men and women in the military, my friends, she does not,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and half years after his plane was shot down in 1967. “Because she has never supported the mission; she has never supported victory whether it be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world. Barbara Boxer wants to wave the white flag of surrender and endanger this nation’s national security. It’s time she went back to San Francisco with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi.”
To which I respond with Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) assessment of John McCain’s character::
“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
McCain is so pleasant to work with that:
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa said in an interview that he was so upset by a McCain tirade that he didn’t speak to him for two years.
Sen. Grassley is a Republican, too. And, you know? I just don’t read stuff like this about Senator Boxer:
McCain’s feuds with other senators have surfaced regularly. McCain has written about how he screamed at Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama an inch away from his face after Shelby voted against the 1989 nomination of John Tower as defense secretary. “I was madder than hell when I accosted him . . . and the incident is one of the occasions when my temper lived up to its much exaggerated legend.”
While that encounter happened years ago, the Washington Post reported a similar outburst by McCain last year when he shouted an obscenity during a confrontation with Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, over an immigration bill.
Or this:
While [Sen. Thad] Cochran disagrees with McCain about cutting farm programs, he said his concern about McCain is “not about subsidies” but temperament. Cochran said that he has known the McCain family from the days when they lived in Mississippi and got to know McCain well in the 1970s when Cochran served in the US House and McCain served as a naval liaison in Congress. He said he has seen McCain’s temper fly too often in committee hearings or on the Senate floor, although he said he hasn’t seen an example in the last several years.
I’ve seen McCain lose his temper in recent years. Most recently, he lost it over the DREAM Act and DADT provisions in the Defense Appropriations Act. But I leave you with this:
So, who is a pleasure to work with?
