Suicide is Painless

I’m going to kill myself or my boss. Or maybe just hurl… a brick through the always-on CNN television in his office, or my breakfast. If I have to listen to that high-pitched mosquito-like drone of John McCain and his verbal tic of “my friends” for one more fucking minute the odds are good that it may go down in this order: hurl breakfast, brick through the tv and boss through his window.

I voted yesterday morning. I am so disgusted by the McCain/Palin campaign, the depths to which it has sunk: the Anti-American states vs the Pro-American states… the them vs us, the fear-mongering. The nerve of that twitchy little Hitler, to bring up the specter of nukes and to imply that he had been tested during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962?) because he’d been a fighter pilot off the coast of Cuba. Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but as a fighter pilot, he was just sitting there waiting for the orders that would have come from the Commander in Chief, President Kennedy. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were the ones being tested in that instance. And for him to claim that this somehow makes him, Twitchy McCancer Jowls ready to lead? Hah.

You want to talk tested in a time of crisis? Let’s look at his record on the USS Forrester.

One such case involves McCain’s experience in the devastating fire and explosions that killed 134 sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal during the Vietnam War three months before he was shot down over North Vietnam. McCain has made claims about this accident that differ dramatically from parts of the official Navy report and accounts of reliable eyewitnesses…

...Whatever the circumstances of the fire’s origins, McCain did not stay on deck to help fight the blaze as the men around him did. With the firefighting crew virtually wiped out, men untrained in fighting fires had to pick up the fire hoses, rescue the wounded or frantically throw bombs and even planes over the ship’s side to prevent further tragedy. McCain left them behind and went down to the hangar-bay level, where he briefly helped crew members heave some bombs overboard. After that, he went to the pilot’s ready room and watched the fire on a television monitor hooked to a camera trained on the deck.

McCain has never been asked to explain why he claims that the Zuni rocket struck his plane. If a bomb or bombs subsequently fell from McCain’s plane as he has said, it seems to strongly suggests pilot error, and if a bomb or bombs did not fall from his plane, it suggests rash disregard for important facts in his accounts of the accident.

There is plenty more about this story that raises questions about McCain’s truthfulness and judgment. In the first hours after the fire, he apparently did not claim to have been injured. New York Times reporter R.W. Apple, who helicoptered out to the ship the day after the tragedy and sought out McCain as the “son and grandson of two noted admirals,” never mentioned him being wounded, although he reported on him more than on any other crew member. This would be an odd omission on Apple’s part if McCain indeed had been wounded, given that service wounds are usually highlighted in such reports during wartime.

Read the whole report here. Try not to scream with indignation and rage.

And I can’t let this go without a swipe at the other half of the ticket. Lifted from Mr. Fish