McCain throws out Arizona constituent

The question asked of Senator John McCain at a town hall meeting in Arizona…

“Whether or not there were any statistics related to the volume of crimes that were being committed by these illegals and also by the citizen offspring of these illegals, the ones that come across the border and have their baby and okay now they’ve got a US citizen maybe so… “

When asked about illegal immigration at a town hall meeting in Prescott, Arizona, Senator McCain “refused to dignify the question with an answer.”

When pressed for an answer by another attendee, Senator McCain attempted to have her thrown out of the hall.

Click John McCain: Secure Our Borders

McCain mocks Gov. Romney

The upside of anger

McCain’s outbursts are the understandable byproduct of a candidate whose courage is constantly tested by bad luck.

By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
May 23, 2007

The nasty words are flying between the camps. By now, political junkies know how it escalated. Sen. John McCain made fun of former governor Mitt Romney’s suspect devotion to guns and of the news that Romney had used gardeners without green cards. Perhaps, said McCain, Romney’s answer on immigration would be “to get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn.”

In other words, Romney was a pampered phony. It was funny, in a biting way, the McCain we reporters came to know and love: Popeye McCain busting Dudley Do-Right with a tattooed fist.

The Romneyans didn’t find it amusing. Said one at the top of the command structure (who should have had the guts to attach his name to his comments): “That’s what happens to a guy of McCain’s age when he doesn’t take his Metamucil. I don’t think he is the kind of angry fellow we want to let alone with the nuclear arsenal.”

To which John Weaver, a top McCain aide replied: “It was a joke and, by the way, Mitt Romney should be mocked! There isn’t a single issue in politics he hasn’t flip-flopped on. Maybe it works in the takeover world, but not in this one. And, by the way, if John is angry, so are the American people. They are fed up with politics as usual.”

To which the Romney guy replied: “I honor McCain’s service, but I think people are starting to feel a sorry for him. It is gold-watch time. That’s fatal in politics.”

So it goes.

McCain has lived this movie before, which is why he is angry, and I can’t blame him. His courage forever is being tested by his bad luck.

Last time he ran for president, eight years ago, misfortune materialized in the form of George W. Bush, who was everything that made McCain’s blood boil: a wealthy scion, aggressively well connected, running on his daddy’s name and contacts. This time, McCain’s chief tormentor is another Son of—a Romney with two generations of political ties and scores more millions in the bank than a Bush could imagine.

McCain rarely mentions that he, too, is a Son Of: third-generation Annapolis grad and namesake of admirals. But he is entitled to feel like an outsider. Six years in a POW camp during Vietnam gives you that right. His rise has been pretty much self-propelled.

At 70, he feels that this should be his time. He has valid reasons for thinking so. He waited his turn in the traditional Republican fashion. We are in the midst of a slow-motion war, and McCain is a warrior. He knows the world, its dangers and wonders; he knows the military, its powers and its limitations. He knows Washington. He has a big campaign organization, and substantive knowledge of most every issue.

He deserves credit for courage, too. Yes, he has pandered to the Bush crowd and religious conservatives (though he seems uncomfortable doing it, or overcompensates by being too enthusiastic, and all in all looks like he is following a dance-step chart).

Having come this far with Bush, it would be difficult for him to withdraw from the role that Tony Blair has now abandoned—that of cheerleader in chief for the president’s policy in Iraq.

Still, there is courage. His support for the Bush war policy exceeds what is politically necessary; even in the world of the GOP primaries, it is risky at this point. This is a course he genuinely believes in, and will pursue even if it costs him, which it well might. It’s the same story with immigration reform. He has devoted years to it. The compromise he has worked on for years, and helped to fashion recently, is unpopular on all sides. Maybe he has no choice but to stick with it. But he is.

Now to the luck. The war, of course, has been disastrously run, which isn’t his fault. Romney, who is moving up in Iowa and New Hampshire—indeed, he is functionally the front runner in the “early” states—can dip into his vast fortune if circumstances require. McCain’s most prominent evangelical supporter, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, died last week. McCain fell behind in early fund-raising, and now has to catch up—and miss vote after vote in the Senate. A friend and ally, Fred Dalton Thompson, is waiting in the wings for McCain to falter, and may well soon join the race.

So it came as no surprise that when, in a meeting on immigration recently, Sen. John Cornyn—part of the Bush Texas machine—got McCain going by accusing him of “parachuting” into the talks at the last minute, since he was spending most of his time fund-raising.

“F— you,” McCain is reported to have said.

Everybody is entitled to write his own campaign slogan.

McCain demeans Asians

John McCain’s racist remark very troubling

By Katie Hong
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 2, 2000

On his campaign bus recently, Sen. John McCain told reporters, “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” Although McCain said he was referring only to his prison guards, there are many reasons why his use of the word “gook” is offensive and alarming.

It is offensive because by using a racial epithet that has historically been used to demean all Asians to describe his captors, McCain failed to make a distinction between his torturers and an entire racial group.

It is alarming because a major candidate for president publicly used a racial epithet, refused to apologize for doing so and remains a legitimate contender.

Contrary to McCain’s attempt to narrowly define “gook” to mean only his “sadistic” captors, this term has historically been used to describe all Asians. McCain said that “gook” was the most “polite” term he could find to describe his captors, but because it is simply a pejorative term for Asians, he insulted his captors simply by calling them “Asians” — a clearly disturbing message. To the Asian American community, the term is akin to the racist word “nigger.” A friend of mine, a white male Vietnam veteran, pointed out that veterans, especially Vietnam veterans, know how spiteful the term “gook” is. It has everything to do with labeling someone as “other,” the enemy and yellow. McCain sent the message that all Asians are foreigners and remain forever the “other” and the enemy.

The perception of Asians as “foreigners” or “the other” isn’t new. This sentiment is what led to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Japanese American internment during World War II. The internment of Japanese Americans is now recognized as one of the worst civil rights violations in our country’s history and a powerful lesson in what can happen when race alone is used as a test for loyalty or who is defined as an American.

We’ve made tremendous progress as a nation in overcoming racism. That is why it is so disturbing that a major candidate for the U.S. president can perpetuate the stereotype of Asians as permanent foreigners, hurtling us backward to a time and a place where such racial epithets were an acceptable part of mainstream discourse.

What makes this incident even more disturbing is how neither the media nor the other presidential candidates have highlighted that his use of a racist term is unacceptable.

Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing minority populations in the United States. And the media’s choice to ignore or excuse McCain’s behavior is a painful reminder that Asians remain outsiders on the back steps of national American politics.

McCain’s main campaign message is inclusion. What his actions have told me, however, is that his inclusion does not include people who look like me.

I love this country just as much as McCain does, and I am committed to serving my community and my country. That is the reason I have entered a career in public service and why I am committed to making America a great country where equal opportunity and justice for everyone is a reality and not just a vision.

This is also why I am so hurt by McCain’s comment: He has reminded me that despite my commitment to serving my country, there are still some people in this country who would first perceive me as the enemy.

Katie Hong is a Korean American woman who lives in Seattle and works for Washington state government.

McCain bullies Arizona Republic reporters

The Arizona Republic - October 17, 1989 “. . . both in telephone conversations with reporters and on a live radio talk show, the Republican senator was far from calm. He was agitated. Angry. And the way he dealt with unpleasant questions was to bully the questioners . . . ‘You’re a liar,’ McCain snapped Sept. 29 when an Arizona Republic reporter asked him about business ties between his wife, Cindy McCain, and Keating . . . ‘That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,’ McCain sneered later in the same conversation. ‘You do understand English, don’t you?’ “. . . Not content with just bullying reporters, McCain tried belittling them: ‘It’s up to you to find that out, kids.’ . . . McCain wasn’t talking to liars. He wasn’t talking to juveniles. The senator was talking to two reporters.”

McCain mocks Sen. Obama

John McCain’s temper preceded Vietnam

Ronald Kessler
NewMax.com
August 30, 2006

(excerpted)

At other times, McCain is simply nasty, those who know him say. Last February, McCain sent Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a mocking letter, saying he wanted to “apologize” for “assuming” Obama’s private assurances of working together were sincere.

“I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics, I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble,” McCain said sarcastically. “Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.”

McCain and Obama later talked and agreed to “move on,” as McCain put it. Senators joke among themselves about their collection of “McCain Notes” — apologies McCain sends after he has unleashed a tirade.

McCain belittles Iranians

McCain: I was talking with some of my old veterans friends [regarding my comments about bombing Iran], and my response is, “lighten up and get a life”.

Report: You don’t think it was insensitive or in any way making light of… ?

McCain: Insensitive to what? … the Iranians? (laughing)

McCain provokes Iran

Buchanan: McCain win would mean war with Iran

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
MSNBC News
January 28, 2008

Says McCain would provoke new wars, ‘he’s in everybody’s face’

“More wars” could prove to be the oddest of all presidential campaign slogans. Especially if it works.

Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, “There’s going to be other wars. … I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked old-line conservative Pat Buchanan about McCain’s remarks, saying, “He talked about promising that more wars were coming. … Is he so desperate to get off the economic issue?”

Pat Buchanan replied that McCain never used the word “promise” but simply said there would be more wars, and that from McCain’s point of view, “that is straight talk. … You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran.”

“That’s one of the things that makes me very nervous about him,” Buchanan went on. “There’s no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. … His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we’re going to be in Iraq a hundred years.”

“So when he says more war,” Scarborough commented, “he is promising you, if he gets in the White House, we’ll not only be fighting this war but starting new wars. Is that what conservative Republicans want?

“I don’t say he’s starting them,” Buchanan answered. “He expects more wars. … I think he’s talking straight, because if you take a look at the McCain foreign policy, he is in everybody’s face. Did you see Thad Cochran’s comment when he endorsed Romney? He said, look, John McCain is a bellicose, red-faced, angry guy, who constantly explodes.”

“Not a happy message,” commented Scarborough. “Not Reaganesque.”

McCain insults the Vietnamese

Robert Dreyfuss
The Nation
December 15, 1999

(excerpted)

Perhaps the most striking example of the media’s unwillingness to challenge McCain’s air of moral authority is when he shocks listeners by casually calling the Vietnamese “gooks.” The racist and disparaging term, popularized by GIs during the war, occurs repeatedly in a 1973 U.S. News & World Report account penned by McCain after his release from prison. “The ‘gooks’ were bombarding us with antiwar quotes from people in high places back in Washington,” he wrote, referring to the propaganda that his captors gave him. A quarter of a century later, while speaking with reporters aboard the Straight Talk Express in October, McCain was still calling Vietnamese “gooks”–and according to a reporter who was there, no one called him on it. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the reporters were thinking: Well, this guy spent five years in a prison camp, so he can say anything he wants. Roger Simon, writing in U.S. News, cited the incident and added: “John McCain says ‘gooks,’ and who’s going to tell him not to?”

McCain insults Rep. Barton, Sen. Kennedy

The Politics of Sanctimony

By George Will
November 15, 1999

The disagreeable incense of sanctimony is permeating presidential politics. The principal sanctity-mongers are John McCain, Bill Bradley and Al Gore.

McCain, the Savonarola from Arizona, is the favorite Republican of those (e.g. the media) who regret that there are Republicans. Two supposed proofs that he has cornered the market on virtue are his insistence that his campaign-reform legislation is necessary because everyone in politics, himself emphatically included, is corrupt, and the fact that his tantrums demonstrate his “authenticity” and noble intolerance of sin.

“I plead guilty,” he says in a guilty-plea-as-self-congratulation gambit, “to getting angry when I see gross injustices take place such as I see happen quite often in the Congress of the United States. But do I insult anybody or fly off the handle or anything like that? No, I don’t.”

Atlantic Monthly, December 1985: “Just after the July 4 recess, as freshman Joe Barton was walking down the center aisle of the House to cast a vote, he found himself in the middle of an angry cross fire of epithets between Democrat Marty Russo, of Illinois, and Republican John McCain, of Arizona. Seven-letter profanities escalated to twelve-letter ones and then to pushes and shoves before the two were separated.”

Boston Globe, Aug. 6, 1993: “McCain came across the Senate floor and while mocking Kennedy, told him to ’shut up,’ according to observers in the chamber. A stunned Kennedy returned the comment, telling McCain to ’shut up’ and ‘act like a senator.”‘

Various current Republican senators, who say many of McCain’s outbursts are not about matters of policy (”gross injustices”) but about personal pique, speak off the record with astonishing asperity about McCain, expressing doubts–if not conviction–that his temper is evidence of a temperament unsuited to the presidency. The disqualifying flaw, they say, is characterized by a righteousness that makes McCain disdain the motives of those who differ with him.

And actually it is kindness, not, as some McCain supporters imply, cowardice, that causes these senators to speak only off the record. They expect George Bush’s strength in the primaries to obviate the need for more open criticism of their colleague.

Bill Bradley’s low-voltage campaigning–call it the charisma of Morpheus–is a reprise of Eugene McCarthy’s style during his 1968 meander against President Lyndon Johnson. (Remember McCarthy’s drollery: Running for president is like coaching football–you have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it is important.) And before McCarthy there was Adlai Stevenson, supposedly so exquisitely thoughtful that asking him to mix with less worthy politicians would be akin to sending Henry James to a NASCAR race.

Bradley began his campaign talking incessantly about his unique sensitivity to, and unique bravery in talking honestly about, racial problems. Mercifully, he seems to have concluded–for the moment; recidivism would not startle–that he has worked this pedal on the organ quite enough. But for months he practiced something Richard Brookhiser of National Review, writing in the New York Observer, says we have seen before:

“Mr. Bradley practices a special form of guilt-inducement, which also (sadly) became a technique of Jack Kemp’s: the athlete’s sneer. Because Mr. Bradley played games with prosperous black men in the 1960s and 1970s, he thinks that only he, out of all the white race, has enlightened sentiments on questions of race and poverty, and he won’t let the palefaces forget it.”

As Bradley is learning, Gore is a ferocious partisan who constantly detects the defect of partisanship, meaning a lack of honorable motives, in those who disagree with him. He denounces opponents of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as “reckless” (Sen. Richard Lugar? Six former secretaries of defense?) and partisan (two former CIA directors appointed by Clinton?). And he says that Senate opposition to his pride and joy, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for allocating among nations duties for dealing with global warming, is “partisan.”

Partisan? Five months before the protocol was signed, the Senate said that in the shape it was taking (and in the end took), the protocol would be radically unacceptable. By a vote of 95-0 the Senate passed a resolution conditioning ratification on substantial changes in it. Having ignored that vote, the administration now does not dare to submit the protocol for ratification.

Gore’s multiplying accusations of partisanship reflect a mentality unable to accept that honorable, intelligent people can differ about most things. The name for this mentality is: fanaticism.

For Gore, as for Bradley and McCain, the politics of sanctimony involves denigrating the motives, and hence the character, of opponents. Which is why the incense dispensed by the sanctimonious smells sulfurous.

McCains insults Chelsea Clinton, Janet Reno

McCain’s Out-of-Control Anger: Does He Have the Temperament to Be President?

By Ronald Kessler
NewsMax.com
July 5, 2006

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is considered a front-runner for the 2008 race, but does McCain have the temperament to be president?

As portrayed by the mainstream media, McCain is an engaging war hero, a man of political moderation positioned between the left and the right.

But to insiders who know him, McCain has an irrational, explosive side that make many of them question whether he is fit to serve as president and be commander in chief.

Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the Senate, where McCain has few friends or supporters. In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him.

“I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues,” said former Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee and on Republican policy committees. “He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We’ve all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I’ve never seen anyone act like that.”

McCain’s outbursts often erupted when other members rebuffed his requests for support during his bid in 2000 for the Republican nomination for president. A former Senate staffer recalled what happened when McCain asked for support from a fellow Republican senator on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

“The senator explained that he had already committed to support George Bush,” the former Senate staffer said. “McCain said ‘f— you’ and never spoke to him again.”

“He had very few friends in the Senate,” said former Senator Smith, who dealt with McCain almost daily. “He has a lot of support around the country, but I don’t think he has a lot of support from people who know him well.”

Another former senator who requested anonymity recalled an exchange at a Republican policy lunch. McCain turned on another senator who disagreed with him.

“McCain used the f-word,” the former senator said. “McCain called the guy a ‘sh–head.’ The senator demanded an apology. McCain stood up and said, ‘I apologize, but you’re still a sh–head.’ That was in front of 40 to 50 Republican senators. That sort of thing happened frequently.”

“People who disagree with him get the f— you,” said former Rep. John LeBoutillier, a New York Republican who had an encounter with McCain when he was on a POW task force in the House. After LeBoutillier had openly tape recorded comments at a conference, McCain got the idea that LeBoutillier was secretly tape recording him.

“Are you wired up?” LeBoutillier quoted McCain as asking. “Of course not,” LeBoutillier said.

“Prove it,” McCain said.

LeBoutillier said he lowered his pants, apparently satisfying McCain that he was not taping him.

“He is a vicious person,” LeBoutillier said. “Nearly all the Republican senators endorsed Bush because they knew McCain from serving with him in the Senate. They so disliked him that they wouldn’t support him. They have been on the hard end of his behavior.”

Andrea Jones, McCain’s press secretary, did not respond to requests from NewsMax for comment.

Senators are leery of speaking on the record about what McCain is really like. Bob Smith described his behavior reluctantly. A former Republican senator listed Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Pete Dominici, fellow Republican senators, as being among those who had encountered McCain’s outbursts, but none of them agreed to be interviewed on the subject.

Most major media outlets have been uninterested in pursuing the subject. Virtually every media outlet ran Sen. Trent Lott’s comment at a 100th birthday tribute to Strom Thurmond. As a result of the criticism over his remarks, Lott stepped aside as Senate majority leader.

But only a few news outlets, like the Phoenix New Times in Arizona and the National Journal, that ran an Associated Press story reporting McCain’s 1998 joke suggesting that Chelsea Clinton was ugly and Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton were lesbians.

“Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?” McCain said at a GOP fund-raiser in Washington. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”

McCain apologized to the Clintons. But more recently, McCain said on Fox News, “You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who is still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn’t have the face for it.”

In part because he gives reporters access and charms them with his apparent openness, McCain gets good press.

“A presidential candidate is not supposed to talk at length and on the record about the rules he broke or the strippers he dated, or the time he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of the young lady he was wooing,” Time wrote in a Dec. 13, 1999 profile of McCain. “The candor tells you more than the comment, and reporters sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they don’t want to see him flame out and burn up a great story.”

“National reporters may genuflect, but local journalists cringe at the thought of covering McCain, better known in Arizona for his short temper, refusal to take calls, and attempts at media manipulation than for the ‘straight talk’ he doles out . . .” a Playboy profile said in February 2000.

When people have come forward to relate their bizarre experiences with McCain, only minor publications or the foreign press have run their accounts. The favored treatment is reminiscent of the way the press turned a blind eye to John F. Kennedy’s dalliances — except that voters have far more need to know about evidence of instability than presidential infidelities.

“The White House is a character crucible,” according to Bertram S. Brown, M.D., a psychiatrist who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health and was an aide to President John F. Kennedy. “It either creates or distorts character . . . . Even if an individual is balanced, once someone becomes president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor?

“Here is where the true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure.”

When asked about his temper, McCain has portrayed himself as angry about issues.

“Do I feel passionately about issues? Absolutely,” McCain has said. “Do I get angry when I see pork barreling and wasteful spending? Absolutely.”

But McCain’s outbursts have not been directed at policy issues or waste. Instead, even if they are longtime friends, he explodes at people who disagree with him or who tell him they cannot support him.

Pat Murphy, an editor at the Arizona Republic, became friends with McCain in the early 1980s. As Murphy rose to become publisher of the paper, their friendship continued.

In 1989, Murphy and his wife Betty had lunch with McCain in the Senate dining room. They were talking about a hearing on a federal project to build a dam system designed to deliver water from the Colorado River to Arizona. Even though the project was supposed to be non-partisan, McCain told Murphy he had planted highly technical questions with a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee to ask when Rose Mofford, the governor of Arizona, testified.

The idea was, because she was a Democrat, to make her squirm when she did not know the answers.

Murphy was horrified and told McCain his feelings. After that, McCain froze him out.

“What has struck me about McCain is that everybody underestimated the ability of his advisers and him to hypnotize the national media, because most of us in the media in Arizona thought of him as a guy who had a terrible temper, occasionally had a foul mouth, a guy who whined and pouted unless he got his way,” Murphy said. “McCain has a temper that is bombastic, volatile, and purple-faced. Sometimes he gets out of control. Do you want somebody sitting in the White House with that kind of temper?’

Former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, a Democrat, encountered McCain’s temper when he and other local mayors briefed the Arizona congressional delegation on local issues. After Johnson spoke, McCain said, “Hold it a minute. Somebody write down everything this guy has to say. You know what, we need to record him. It’s best to get a liar on tape.”

Johnson stood up and said, “Senator, if you have a problem with me, why don’t we go out in the hallway and talk about it.”

“You’re goddamn right I have a problem with you,” McCain said. “They’ve been treating you like a princess in Phoenix while they’ve been burning me over this dam deal, and I’m sick of it.”

A longtime member of Senator Dennis DeConcini’s staff, Judy Leiby, worked on veteran’s issues and had differed with McCain on some of them over the years. After DeConcini announced he was retiring in 1994, McCain showed up in his office.

“I was standing around talking to about a half a dozen postal workers I’d worked real closely with,” Leiby recalled. “And McCain came in. He walked down the line, shaking hands, and he ignored me. And one postal worker said, ‘Do you know Judy Leiby?’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know her.’”

McCain turned away from Leiby, trembling.

“You could tell he was so angry, he was white,” she said. “He turned back to me and said, ‘I’m so glad you’re out of a job, and I’ll see that you never work again.’”

Of this incident, McCain said that because he didn’t hold Leiby in “particularly high esteem,” he thought it would be hypocritical to shake her hand. “I didn’t raise my voice, didn’t offer any disparaging remarks or insults,” he said.

Jim Abbott, the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, reported a similar threat by McCain in 1989. Worried about the impact on the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel, Abbott ordered a halt to construction of University of Arizona telescopes at the top of the mountain. McCain then asked to meet with Abbott and said, “If you do not cooperate on this project, you’ll be the shortest-tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service.”

A few days later, McCain called Abbott to apologize. Construction ultimately proceeded after McCain backed legislation to create an exemption for the project from the Endangered Species Act and other existing laws.

Democrat Marty Russo had an altercation with McCain when McCain was in the House, according to the Atlantic Monthly.

“Seven-letter profanities escalated to 12-letter ones and then to pushes and shoves, before the two were separated,” according to the account.

In 1993, the Boston Globe reported that McCain “came across the Senate floor and, while mocking [Ted] Kennedy, told him to ‘shut up,’ according to observers in the chamber. “A stunned Kennedy returned the comment, telling McCain to ‘shut up’ and ‘act like a senator.’”

The previous year, Robin Silver and Bob Witzeman, both medical doctors, met with McCain at his Phoenix office to discuss the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. At the mention of the issue, McCain erupted.

“He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room,” Silver said. “He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us.”

After Silver pointed out that his behavior was inappropriate, “He apologized and was contrite,” Silver said.

Indeed, senators joke among themselves about their collection of “McCain Notes” — apologies McCain sends after he has unleashed a tirade. The question on the minds of those who know him is whether a man who seems so out of control should have the authority to unleash nuclear weapons.

“I think he is not fit to be president,” said former congressman LeBoutillier.