Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Thad Cochran Didn't Want To Be VP Anyway 

...it is said - oh, Lord, how often it is said - that Barack Obama suffers from the fact that the American people don't know him. That may be true and, if it is, it says some scary things about the state of the American electorate more than anything else, given the wall-to-wall primary coverage over the last eighteen months. What isn't said much, but would be equally true were it to be said more often, is that the American people don't know John McCain. The American people really don't know all that much about John McCain aside from the thumbnail offered up by the SCLM (he's a Maverick and an Heroic POW), and one of the things they don't know about is his monumentally volcanic temper. Ironically, today along comes fellow Republican US Senator Thad Cochran to "help" his presumptive party nominee and colleague by relating a story about McCain almost provoking an international incident by manhandling a Sandinista official during a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua in 1987...

The good news for Huggy Bear is that Cochran simply has the best interests of the party and his quest for the presidency at heart, despite their past conflicts over the subject of budgetary earmarks and Cochran's ruminations about a McCain presidency earlier this year:
'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.'

Bygones can be bygones, eh? Bury the hatchet and all that. Cochran insists that he merely recounting this story from two decades ago to demonstrate how the Ol' Maverick has grown, mellowed, and matured over the years. I know I'm certainly glad, if the Senator is correct, that McCain has outgrown a predilection for hurling foreign government officials around the room. Such behavior would make a hash of any future G-8 summits and would no doubt make Angela Merkel reflect on unsolicited neckrubs with something akin to fondness...

The less good news for Huggy Bear is that his penchant for wild petulance is once again creeping into the news stream, where he and his minions have to deny a) that the episode ever happened, 2) that he has a vicious temper, and III) that he plans on kicking the Honorable Senator from Mississippi's wrinkled lying white butt up and down the marbled halls of Congress at the first available opportunity. Senator Cochran should be saluted, though, for reassuring the voting public that John McCain has mastered his once-uncontrollable temper. He should take advantage of every possible opportunity at as big a microphone as he can find to continue to reassure the American people that John McCain hasn't totally blown out at anyone in quite some time...well, at least not recently...as far as Cochran knows. We deserve to be frequently reassured about the level-headedness of the candidates as we try to decide who should next lead our country...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:13 PM

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