McCain raises spectre of nuclear war

[FrenchieCat]

Source: Associated Press

John McCain raised the spectre of nuclear war as he struggled to overcome rival Barack Obama's widening lead in the polls with just 14 days left in the epic race to the White House.
-snip-
"I sat in the cockpit on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise off of Cuba. I had a target," McCain said, referring to the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.

"I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president that needs to be tested. I have been tested. Senator Obama has not."

But the Arizona senator's campaign was smarting after a poll by the Pew Research Centre showed Obama ahead by 14 points, and an investigation of Republican funds indicated more than $US150,000 ($A221,500) spent on clothes for his running mate Sarah Palin.



Read more: http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/full-coverage/5094558/mccain-raises-spectre-nuclear-war/

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:wtf:

That's all we need from Sen. McErratic! Fear Card being played. Ain't gonna work!

[Indenturedebtor]

1. Sounds like "I could see Cuba from my cockpit"..

reminds me of something someone said about a front porch recently :eyes:

[electron_blue]

20. LOL! I think that's exactly what it is.

[Democat]

2. McCain: If you vote for me, we're all gonna die patriotically!

McCain promises to bring back the famous "Duck and Cover" method for all patriotic Americans! :rofl:

[krkaufman]

3. Did he give any example of how he's been tested in such a crisis?

'cause I wasn't too impressed with his response to the financial crisis. "Erratic" is putting it kindly.

[MJJP21]

4. I think

I think he is claiming his experience because he was on active duty during the Cuban missile crisis. Clearly McBush seems to be delusional at this point.

[krkaufman]

5. Ok, but if that's the case, he wasn't "tested" at all ...

... since, as a pilot his job is simply to follow his orders. He wasn't faced with any command decision as regards the Cuban missile crisis.

Or is McCain saying he was contemplating not following orders? Because that's the only decision he'd be in a position to make in that scenario.

[bulloney]

9. I'm not impressed with how he handled himself when he was in the military.

What did he do? Crash four, five planes. Four of them were because he was screwing off and not following procedure.

Yeah. That's someone I want to have with his finger on the button to launch a war.

There have been dirty campaigns in my lifetime. This one tops them all in hyperbole, fear mongering, racism and plain old ignorance.

[krkaufman]

12. I don't have the words to express my disgust with John McCain and the campaign he's run.

I have to resist the feeling of relishing McCain's defeat, as opposed to hoping for Obama's victory.

[4lbs]

6. The problem is that if McCain were the President and "pushed the button", due to his track record,

all the missiles would go up and then come spiraling right back down and crash to the ground.

[DRoseDARs]

7. Sooo, it wasn't back channel negotiations by Kennedy and Khrushchev, but rather...

...McCain managing to NOT crash a plane for once?

[protect our future]

8. Raising that spectre worked for Bush in '04.

This time it won't.

[pokercat999]

10. McPain HAS been tested............and he crashed the plane....nt

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bluedeminredstate]

13. LOL!

Thanks for that! Now I have to go clean my keyboard...


:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[YDogg]

17. I LOLd.

[Vinca]

14. He truly must be senile. Do we want the image of Sarah Palin

in her designer duds hovering over the nuclear (excuse me, new-q-ler) button?

[greyghost]

15. He'll throw anything against the wall won't he? I remember when

LBJ destroyed Goldwater with...:nuke:

[scarface2004]

16. i didn t say we wouldn t get our hair mussed!

we lose 10, 20 million tops!!

[central scrutinizer]

21. I need to watch that movie again

Very prescient. So many of the characters could be played by McHoover.

[DallasNE]

18. McCain, You Aren't The Only One

Who was on an active duty alert in October, 1962. A lot of us were tested in the sense you cite. And we believe that Sen. Obama would be more likely to make the right choices in such a circumstance rather than some hot-headed, stubborn over the hill angry Senator from Arizona. And we don't think Obama would put Michelle on a $150,000 clothing budget. He would be much more fiscally responsible and a whole lot less elistist than that. His vision for America is far more in tune with mine than McCain will ever be capable of. McCain and Palin are already corrupted. We don't need more of that. Bush has shown us where that leads.

[MissMillie]

19. I don't know why he thinks he's helping himself by proposing this scenario

He's one of the last people I would want running things if any situation would come to this.

[treestar]

22. If that was your test, McCrap, it was over 40 years ago

When JFK was President!

:rofl:

And you were 40 years younger then! You thought you might one day be President then?

:rofl:

[hedgehog]

23. "I have been tested." Yeah, here's how McCain reacted in a crisis:

"McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs "cooked off," blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren't serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny "came through without a scratch."

The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.

These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then "gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."


http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain/page/4

[Igel]

24. You miss the backstory.

The reporter probably knew it, and decided to not include it. Or maybe the reporter didn't know it, either. In either case another reporter should have had the story.

The "test" isn't so much the missile crisis itself, as what almost certainly led to it: Negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev early in Kennedy's tenure that Kennedy himself realized he almost certainly failed at. He came off as a greenhorn, a weakling, someone who could be pushed around. While unprovable, it's likely that had Kennedy been stronger for those talks the Cuban missile crisis wouldn't have happened. The risk would have been too great, the outcome too predictable.

The media (here being a decided plural) were divided on discussing this when Obama pointed out this precise bit of palaver as a model for what he'd do. One side pointed out the unprovability of saying that the talks were a mistake, tried to deny that the talks went badly, and encouraged recklessness by Nikita etc., and dismissed the assertion as fear-mongering. The other side quoted an aide quoting Kennedy to the effect that if he were perceived as weak then they were in for trouble, and pointed out a historical truism involving Russia, one borne out in Soviet archival materials involving the missile crisis, Prague Spring, Hungary in '56, and other cases.

There's a constant in dealing with Russia: If they believe that something they want can be acquired with little risk to their interests, they will go for it. It's pretty much a universal, except that "risk" usually is construed more narrowly. "Risk" usually doesn't involve international law, international relations, or international public opinion. "Risk" usually involves their military, domestic opinion and pride/nationalism/ideology, and money and/or influence in countries that matter to Russia; everything else can be repaired afterwards, the thinking is, once facts on the ground are established, since everybody else will want to repair relations more than Russia herself would. * in 2003 was acting very Russian.

This is what many conservatives will understand McCain to have been saying, a not-so-veiled criticism of Obama, with the comeback that having one's finger on any trigger, and being resolute in the determination to use force, constitute a kind of qualification. (Or, as one conservative pundit put it recently, not "speaking softly and carrying a little stick.") If you don't understand the discourse and context, you can't possibly understand what's intended and all that's left is a kind of solipsistic reflection of yourself.

[bemildred]

25. This is getting embarrassing. nt

[TrogL]

26. OK, I was wrong - an A-4 is nuclear capable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-4_Skyhawk