Whoa... what a firestorm. At the insistence of many TTPers, last week's How the Clintons Will Destroy John McCain was made a free access article and promptly went viral over the Internet, becoming explosively controversial.
As you can see from the comments on the Member User Forum (145, a TTP record), the response from TTPers was overwhelmingly positive. I also received a number of responses from personal friends. Most were very supportive, a few were vehemently upset, with most of the latter assuring me that I remained their friend nonetheless. I cannot adequately express how much this meant to me.
Then there were those among the latter whose friendship I have lost. I am most regretful of losing that of Jim Warner's. Jim had been a dear friend of many years. I know of no finer man than Jim Warner, a man of unquestionable character and integrity.
As a captured POW held by the Communist Vietnamese for over five years, and a cell mate in the Hanoi Hilton of John McCain's for over a year, Jim felt it necessary to write a rebuttal to my article - without mentioning either my name or the article - in FrontPage Magazine.com.
It is easy to understand Jim's desire to defend his cellmate with whom he suffered indescribable horrors at the hand of the communists. Thus the excruciating irony of Jim's article - for John McCain possesses a fraction of the integrity and decency of character of Jim Warner. I would trust my life to Jim Warner without a moment's hesitation. I would not trust my life to John McCain for a moment.
His candidacy may become a tragic joke being played upon America. For any joke to resonate, there has to be a core of truth to it. Think of the original Jewish American Princess joke about what she makes best for dinner - reservations. Now think if that joke were told about Italian women. Instead of a laugh, you'd get a huh?
This is why the allegation that McCain colluded with his communist captors cannot be dismissed as ridiculous, and could have fooled decent men like Jim Warner - because he has conducted so much of his life ever since his captivity with so little integrity.
It's easy to find a Republican Senator who will tell you that McCain has more than once stabbed him in the back. He is not a man of his word. He cannot be trusted - and isn't among his senatorial colleagues.
It's far worse than that for a number of those colleagues, for McCain committed what they consider an act of treason by leaking classified information to the Washington Post about CIA secret prisons holding Moslem terrorists.
The WaPo editors who ran the front page headline story, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons, on November 2, 2005 clearly should have been indicted for treason. There were immediate calls for Senate hearings to investigate the matter, which were then squashed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
That's because, as reported by the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill, the leak was traced to a meeting of Republican Senators with no staffers present, during which the CIA secret prisons were discussed. The Hill then revealed:
"GOP aides conjectured privately that Frist's delay... may have been caused by concern over the possibility of endangering a Republican senator by calling for the investigation."
I soon learned - and told TTPers in To The Big House Instead of the White House? - that the "endangered senator" was John McCain.
Further, it's hard to trust a man who is drunk - not with booze but with his ego. A man ego-drunk past the 3rd stage of drunkenness, and into the 4th.
Perhaps you have heard the joke about the 4 stages of drunkenness. The 1st stage is, "I'm handsome!" The 2nd stage is, "I'm rich!" The 3rd stage is, "I'm bullet-proof!" The 4th and final stage is, "I'm invisible!"
A 72 year-old geezer still thinks he's a dashing fighter pilot, "Ace" McCain. That was his Navy nickname, not because he shot down enemy aircraft, but because he was a "reverse ace," having destroyed five of his own airplanes.
He's rich because he dumped his crippled wife who raised his kids and waited for him during his years of captivity to have an affair with then marry a hot young blonde with millions from her millionaire father - millions that financed his run for office.
He thinks he's bullet-proof because his career is built upon a pose of being not just a war hero, but more of a war hero than any other war hero. And he is so ego-drunk that he thinks all the skeletons in his closet are invisible.
He is despised by legions of Vietnam veterans, and particularly the families of MIAs, American POWs or Missing-In-Action never returned by the North Vietnamese Communists. Take a look at the video on YouTube about the disgraceful blocking of the 1992 POW/MIA Senate hearings by McCain, or the voluminous material provided on the Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain website.
He is especially despised by the Swift Boat Vietnam veterans whose ads condemning the phony heroics of John Kerry prevented the nightmare of a Kerry Presidency. When the ads came out in August of 2004, McCain publicly denounced the Swift Boat veterans as "dishonest and dishonorable."
Okay, Jack, right, all well and good, but you may be asking: "What about ‘T'? What about McCain's alleged collaboration with his Vietnamese captors? How can that be squared with Jim Warner's moving description of McCain as his prisonmate?"
First, T is a real person. If you Googled T's real name, you would get hundreds of hits, and clicking on "images" would get you T's picture. Just to reconfirm things, yesterday I asked one of the Members of Congress who has been briefed by T if T was "credible." The answer was: "Oh, very credible. Everything checks out to the best I have been able to determine."
Last night, I had dinner with another Congressman, just the two of us. He said of T: "I have known [T] since the 1990s. This is a very impressive, very competent person who hated the Soviet Union and thus encouraged the CIA-GRU document swap in 1991. I have always found [T] to be impeccably honest. Credible? Absolutely."
Then he added: "You should know that [T] is in semi-seclusion right now. It is extremely dangerous for anyone in Moscow to be associated with Putin's rivals, which [T] has been, or do anything that might cause public attention and draw Putin's wrath."
So, for all those folks who have asked that I disclose my sources for the story of McCain's collaboration - the above three paragraphs is all the corroboration I'm going to provide.
My only observation about Jim's article is that, as an inmate in the Hanoi Hilton, he was in no position to know about the GRU overseeing it, as the Soviets went to great pains to have that be unknown.
I have known about this story, about T, for several years. But there was never any reason to expose it - until now. And I did so not to make a claim, but to provide an example.
An example so shocking that it would be a splash of ice cold water in the faces of those Republicans suffering the delusion that McCain, once he has the nomination for sure and the GOP is stuck with him, won't be torn to shreds by the New York Times and the liberal media.
TTP stands for To The Point - not Beside The Point. And that's what all this torrent of op-eds arguing why conservatives should or will have to support McCain, or analyzing what conservative running mate would be best (Mark Sanford? Haley Barbour? Or God forbid, Mike Huckabee?), is irrelevant, totally beside the point.
If the GOP nominates McCain as its candidate in early September, by late October there will be nothing left of his reputation and his candidacy - and he is too ego-drunk to realize it.
This will happen whether Hillary or Obama is the Dem opponent.
If Hillary, she'll unleash the dogs of hell. Those GRU records the CIA supposedly has will be leaked on the front page of every major newspaper in the country - or something to put the war-hero image in doubt. And it will be easy to cause that doubt among voters - because of all the other dirt accompanying it.
The story of his dumping his crippled wife for a hot rich blonde will be known by every conscious person in America by late September. Then the identities of the women lobbyists with whom he has been cheating on his blonde rich wife will be known by early October.
In tandem will appear a myriad of stories about how he betrayed his colleagues in the Senate on vote after vote, promise after promise. And of course, how he committed treason by leaking classified info to WaPo.
My mid-October, stories on doubts about his war record will start. He betrayed his wife and his party - could he have betrayed his nation and his fellow POWs in Vietnam? Questions like that will pop up all over the media and the Internet.
Then out comes the GRU archives or similar evidence, and when McCain denounces them, the New York Times will counter with a demand: "Senator McCain, to put these doubts to rest about your war record and what actually happened while you were a POW, we ask that you order the release of your classified Pentagon debriefing records."
Instantly there will be a media feeding frenzy. Every POW was lengthily and deeply debriefed by the Pentagon after getting out of Communist prison. McCain has rebuffed every demand that his debriefing be declassified and made public. "Put the doubt to rest, Senator! Release your war records!" will be the frenzy's refrain.
All you need is doubt, not proof. Enough doubt, and a politician's candidacy is doomed.
And in the meantime, agents of the left will be stalking McCain wherever he goes, armed with a deadly weapon of political assassination: a cell phone with video capability.
Again, realize, McCain is not emotionally stable. His monumental ego is fragile. Push him, hector him, question him, doubt his myth, and at some point his volcanic temper is going to explode. And it will be on video, minutes later on YouTube for everybody in the world to download. McCain will be total toast.
That's if the Dems pick Hillary. If they pick Obama, it will be the same only much worse.
For all of the above will happen with Obama, even if Obama is a nice guy who won't indulge in such viciousness, because the liberal media and all the independently funded liberal 527s will anyway and gleefully.
Further, while the specter of real fascist evil infecting a Hillary White House may be enough to drag Republicans to the polls to vote for McCain whose shattered candidacy lies in ruins of scandal, the promise and hope of Obama will simply wipe McCain out.
Remember that the majority of voters do not vote with their neo-cortex, they vote with their limbic system, not rationally but emotionally.
Obama hasn't an original idea in his head, and what ideas he does have are the most trite liberal bromides. But with him it's all about hope and the future. With him, America is still young. With McCain, it's all about the past. Moreover, Obama comes across as a gentleman - smart, yes, but also friendly, gracious, courteous, a nice guy. McCain by contrast is angry, arrogant, and "prickly" - which means he's what you are when you take the "ly" off prickly.
Forward vs. backward, future vs. past, young vs. old, friendly vs. angry.
Put those feelings, that message, together with the liberal media's destruction of the Myth of McCain, and McCain doesn't have a chance. Not a chance.
Romney, who has no skeletons and has the proven competence to handle the economic disaster headed our way, would have a chance. But not McCain. Barring the one single thing that could alter this - an October Surprise 9/11-scale terrorist attack - Republicans will be waking up November 5th wondering in deep gloom, "What were we thinking?", while the Dems will be suffering hangovers from too much champagne.
Addendum: Just as I finished this (Thursday afternoon, February 7), Romney has dropped out, and McCain gave a great speech at CPAC, which received an enthusiastic reception and Fox commentator (and former Maryland Lt. Governor) Michael Steele said was a "home run" that began to "seal the deal" between McCain and conservatives.
McCain appealed to patriotism, defending America, appointing justices like Roberts, slashing the corporate income tax, and hit other high notes. It served notice upon the Dems that he would clean Hillary's or Obama's clocks on national security issues.
If McCain had consistently given speeches like this over the years, and consistently acted in accordance with them, then the "deal" Steele talked about would have been sealed long ago.
If he keeps giving speeches like this, and he does unify his party with conservative support while the Dems continue to divide themselves with a Hillary-Obama duke out, then the September-October schedule I outlined above will be accelerated.
That is, the liberal media and 527s are not going to wait and take a chance to shaft McCain in the fall. There will emerge in the spring a slow drip-by-drip campaign of scandal-revealing, doubt-mongering, and discreditization. All in broad daylight, right on the front page of the New York Times.
It will continue all through the summer, replete with cell phone-captured videos of maniacal temper tantrums on YouTube, until at some point he psychologically, and his campaign politically comes apart at the seams. The GOP convention will be held in utter turmoil, selecting a candidate out of the blue who has far too little time to mount an effective campaign by November.
Also by the spring, the liberal wolves will decide who the leader of the pack is and tear the loser apart. Right now, that looks like Obama and Hillary, respectively. They will see the need to unite around Obama and leave Hillary's political body in a ditch. No way are they going to wait until their August convention. That will give them time to groom Obama on all the issues and create a surging wave of passion for him while McCain suffers the death of a thousand scandals and doubts until he implodes.
That will be the Dems' strategy in the coming months if conservatives keep cheering for McCain as they did for him at CPAC this afternoon.
What could McCain do to counter it? Lots of things. Here are three examples:
*Pre-empt the scandals. Order the full declassification of his war records. That would go a long way to showing Jim Warner is more right than T (which actually I hope is the case). Come clean on the adulterous affairs. A tough sell, but confessing the sin is more forgivable than being caught.
*Campaign for conservative candidates in Senate races. Mending fences with his colleagues and working for Conservative Republican candidates to prevent Dem consolidation of control of the Senate would help convince folks his new-found conversion to conservatism is real.
*Select Michael Steele as his running mate. Picking Mike Huckabee, who is on knee-pads for McCain, would kill any hope of united conservative support. Picking Steele, a true conservative who understands the morality of capitalism, a former Lt. Governor of an important state, who is impressively articulate without bombast, and who also happens to be black, would be an out-of-the-box, out-of-the-park selection that would rattle the Dems' cages apart. Take that, Obama!
I don't know what to do about the temper and emotional instability, though. Maybe take a lot of 5-hydroxy-tryptophan. Lots.
Sure, I would vote for McCain in November if it comes down to it. But unless he can effectively counter the coming massive assault on his massive vulnerabilities, votes for him will be of no use.
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