Maybe we have missed the real story here, and that is that McCain just isn’t very bright– not knowing what the committee you were on for a dozen years does would certainly lead me to wonder. And it would certainly explain all of his gaffes (Sunna v. Shia and so forth), his decision that Palin is his soul mate, and so on.
It would not be the first time that someone got all the way to the top on the back of a compelling life story and the force of personality. To be honest, I never considered previously that McCain just might not be very smart, but there is some compelling evidence from the past few months to suggest that is the case.
A Mom Anon
Does anyone know if McCain suffered head injuries at some point? I’m not being an ass,I’m serious. It sure would explain alot. It’s either some organic/medical issue or he has psychiatric problems. Whatever it is,he’s not fit for office.
Catpain Haddock
Is McCain Just Dumb? Nope, sadly he is just playing to the base…
ed
John McCain was brutally tortured–physically, mentally, and emotionally–for nearly six years inside an unspeakably horrible Vietnam prison. How dare you question his intelligence and fitness to be President!
Mary Jane Leach
McCain, like Bush, wants to be president, but isn’t really interesting in doing the job of being president. Again, like Bush, he’ll find someone to subcontract the job out to and bristle if anyone mentions/notices it.
handy
Problem is, to Joe Voter, sitting 12 years on a “Commerce Committee” sounds just like the kind of bona fides Mccain claims when he boasts he “knows the economy.”
Of course, we know that he knows he doesn’t. So once again the MSM neglects to do their job, and the consequence (quite possibly) is four more years of the same. Heckuva job, guys.
Dan
He graduated at the very bottom of his class. Even before he was a POW he was DUM.
Will Hunting
what gives? a hurricane blows through town. I lose power for three days and in that time, Lehman, Merrill and AIG all go under and Obama is now behind at both 538 and electoral vote??? what the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck???!!!!???
cleek
894/899 in his Naval Academy class? yeah. not too smart.
he’s probably politically smart, to some degree, though. you can’t hold on that long without some ability…
SpotWeld
I’m not 100% certain McCain wants to be president.
I think he’s be told he wants to be president.
I think he’s really good at following orders (or at the very least pushing himself to fit the mold of other people’s expectations of him.)
I just don’t think he has any skill at actually… well, being president.
smiley
He’s just lying and banking on no one knowing what the commerce committee actually does.
JAF Rusty Shackleford
894/899
AmIDreaming
Well…it takes more than just being a fuck-off to finish that far down in your graduating class. It takes real aptitude to be that resistant to information.
As the old saying goes, it pricketh betimes that will be a sharp thorn. J. Sidney Mac III was flaunting his lack of acuity many, many years ago.
Notorious P.A.T.
He doesn’t know much about domestic affairs, like economics, and he doesn’t know much about foreign policy, like the difference between Shiia and Sunni, but other than that he’s brilliant.
handy
Umm…you live with the electorate you have, not the one you want?
aarrgghh
it must be very strange to be john mccain. a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. he is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
ronathan richardson
I’m wondering what the examples are of McCain doing things that *aren’t* dumb as shit. Are there any? Any at all?
Rick Taylor
We’re not supposed to bring up age, but something has happened in the last eight years; he didn’t use to be this gaffe prone. I remember becoming aware of it when he started going on about how the media were distorting what was going on in Iraq, and that you could walk around safely in a public marketplace, and Petraeus drove in an unarmored humvee.
Those remarks should have disqualified him from being considered seriously as a nominee for the highest office in the land, except all the other Republican candidates were arguably just as bad, for different reasons.
liberatemeiexinfernis
of course McCain isnt very smart. He is just another opportunist, another Bush lite. he got into US Naval Academy because Admiral daddy pulled some strings there, and theh he spent the rest of time mostly banging girls and hookers. Another 60’s era Abercrombie and Fitch man focused mostly on good looks, pretty women and having a good time. and then he got this far because of his wealthy wife..i think his time in Vietnam was the best that ever happened to him, because it allowed him to hide his intellectual lack of curiosity behind the American flag. Has he ever suffered for the bad judgement of leaving his first wife, so burned the midnight oil and waited piously for him? no because if anyone date criticize him on that, the criticizer would be called unpatriotic. Look how much flack Clinton got for a BJ. but no siree, no touching McCain for cheating on his first wife…and there is good chance he could cheat on Cindy..ever notice how he lustily looks at Sarah?
Rick Taylor
The administration lead us into a war under false pretenses, and by 2004 even the man they charged to investigate said there were no weapons of mass destruction. There were millions of refugess, incredible shocking violence, and by then it was obvious it wasn’t going to be the short easy liberation we’d been promised, but an ongoing occupation tying down our military for the forsseable future. And they were re-elected. Even our host, who’s since come his senses, voted for him. After that, nothing surprises me.
yet another jeff
Well, he created a Mavericky image…that was smart…or at least he was smart enough to listen to people that told him he should go Maverick after the Keating 5.
He got the press in the tank for him for a decade, give or take.
MBunge
“We’re not supposed to bring up age, but something has happened in the last eight years”
McCain is starting to remind me of Peter Boyle on “Everybody Loves Raymond”. Doris Roberts held up just fine, but there’s a point in the series where Boyle just sort of implodes and he’s left a shell of himself, both physically and in terms of mental and emotional energy.
Mike
gypsy howell
McCain is repeating Bush as farce.
Rick Taylor
Actually in this case I don’t think McCain is dumb. I think he knows what his committee does, and he’s just lying. It’s probably not a bad idea; he’s not likely to be called out for it, and voters are looking for someone with such experience.
Nemoudeis
Has nobody besides me considered the possibility that McCain actually used to be a much “smarter” man; and since at some point within the last … oh … few years or so, he has undergone a prolonged and mysterious decline in his cognitive faculties?
And by “mysterious,” I mean “see Ronald Reagan, circa 1984 on …”
I’m not snarking; in fact, I wish I was. I’ve been watching McCain carefully whenever I can, and although I’m certain amazing things can be achieved if you’re wealthy enough to have access to the proper regime of therapies and medications, I still can’t help but notice that half the time it looks like Cindy is steering him around at his public events like some sort of animatronic prop. Give it a few more years, and he’ll be the Republican Brezhnev.
DougJ
Is McCain Just Dumb?
Yes.
cleek
yeah. that was pretty sad to watch, actually. they come back for a new season and his lines have been back to almost nothing, and most scenes he just kind of teeters in the corner like an old Frankenstein.
satby
He started out at the bottom of his class and it’s been all downhill from there. Crashed 5 planes??
Amazing how far cash and connections can carry the lesser lights amoung us.
cervantes
There’s no doubt about it, actually — he finished nearly last in his class at the Naval Academy, in spite of the extra indulgence he got from being the son and grandson of admirals. He was a mediocre pilot — did you know that he managed to get himself shot down? He’s publicly admitted to being a bit of a dim bulb on more than one occasion, and he meant it.
But I would add that I see increasing signs of frontotemporal dementia. Not Alzheimer’s disease — his short term memory seems to be intact. But he often has trouble retrieving words, particularly proper nouns (Putin as president of Germany, e.g.); can’t read fluently — note his struggles with the teleprompter; cannot think creatively, which is why he no longer meets with reporters and his public appearances consist entirely the robotic recitation of memorized riffs. He is also losing personality regulation — notable recent instances of displaying anger and hostility in public, over no real provocation. This disease progresses very slowly, so if he does indeed have it, it might not become unavoidably obvious in the next couple of months.
bob
He’s always been a liar and a cheat and always will be.
Rick Taylor
Of course there’s no reason he couldn’t be lying and dumb.
Dreggas
I don’t give a fuck about bringing up age. At 67 my grandmother was still sharp as a tack. She was on the ball, driving, living alone with no assistance etc. By 68 she was starting to decline, going senile, losing her memory and by 72 she was dead from it (at age 70 the decline became more noticable). John McCain is 71 years old and can’t remember what he said just the day before. If that doesn’t scare the living shit out of people that he might be president and keel over leaving the fundie whack job palin running the show then they are fucking dumb.
Scrutinizer
Now John. That’s not being very respectful and deferential to the candidate.
Libby
The consensus among my circle of friends who have had elderly relatives who lapsed into dementia is that he is showing the classic signs of doing so himself.
I don’t think he’s so much dumb as incurious and lazy. He’s never had to work hard to acheive anything, having lived off the accomplishments of others. Which also plays into the dementia idea. As they say, use it or lose it, meaning mental acuity of course.
Fulcanelli
Six years of torture in Vietnam (and crashing how many planes?) would pretty much fry the grey matter and nervous system of just about anybody, never mind the fact that he’s what, 72 years old? What we’re really seeing is the stress cracks from his selling his soul to the demon spawn GOP operatives who’ve been telling him to just stfu and get out there and play the war hero.
Let us do what we do, the syndicate wants you elected, so we’ll get you elected, and here, take this cute, mouthy little alpha bitch from Alaska, she’ll run flack for ya.
Now go old man…
The son of an alcoholic, Admiral or no Admiral, he’s likely got some issues, every child of an alcoholic I’ve ever met does, and his history and record has never indicated he was anything other than a lame student who got where he is due to his name.
Come January, the POTUS job with the problems America has would tweak the shit out of anybody, it’ll fucking crush him if he’s elected, and even if Obama gets in I’d bet his hair is completely white after the second year. Noticed how Bush looks in his recent speeches? He looks like a pedophile thats been worked over for a month in court by his wife’s divorce lawyer.
We are so fucked if he’s elected.
handy
So, in other words, he’s George W. Bush, just aged another 10 years. Great. The next four years are going to be fabulous.
Sasha
This notion of McCain as just not too bright occurred to me about two weeks ago. Once it passed through my brain I started seeing the signs everywhere, including his 5th from the bottom graduation from the Naval Academy and every other serious thing I know about him. He repeats himself and has all his life. He has a market inability to alter a script, something that seems to pass for having a core.
Those (mostly above) who are speculating that he was once smarter than he is now should go back in history and observe his early behavior, speeches, and the like. He has always gotten along by being a marginally bad boy, a semi-James Dean figure who was followed by others. And he was always protected by his family.
Spot on Mr. Cole.
Fwiffo
I can imagine Being There happening once, but twice in a row seems unlikely.
Martin
I’m not sure dumb is the right word. Incurious might be better.
One thing that I get off of Obama is that he’s genuinely interested in governance – in understanding what isn’t working and why and approaching things from the angle of what will make them work. I don’t get that off of McCain (or terribly many politicians, to be honest). McCain just seems to be in it for the title as far as I can tell – and that’s been the case since we observed his massive position shifts since 2000.
If all you are interested in is the title, then the underlying work is not interesting ands so you just aren’t versed on it. It doesn’t make you dumb, it makes you ignorant and in a sense lazy.
Look at many people in startup tech companies. They’re usually there because they live and breathe what the company does. When they leave work, many of them go home and write code, learn new languages, read about their field, and so on. There’s more than enough for a President or Senator to know, and so they need to be genuinely curious about *some* area to become proficient. Biden didn’t learn about foreign policy sitting on a committee or taking the train out of Delaware, he learned about it because it’s simply interesting to him and he’s filled his time learning about it. What’s interesting to McCain? I can’t really point to an area where he seems truly well versed. After all his time in the Senate, he should be able to tower over Obama in some area – economics, foreign policy, etc. He’s somewhat better versed on foreign policy and the military than other areas, but I think Obama owns him on foreign policy, and half of this blog seems to own him on the military, let alone someone like, well, pick any Senator from Virginia.
Dreggas
As an addendum to my last response, some states require drivers over a certain age to re-take a drivers test to make sure they still have the ability to drive well and drive safely. Think about that, there’s a drivers test for people John McCain’s age but here he is running, not to drive, but to run a freaking country.
Punchy
McCain not dumb enough to hire a bunch of rookies to run his campy. He may be an idiot, but he knows who it takes to win.
Just Us League
If you really analyze it, is there a time in McCain’s history when he held responsibility for any critical decision making? Perhaps when he piloted planes? But we know how that turned out. He’s never had to support a family financially, he’s never run a business, never even written his own books, doesn’t make the financial decisions at home (that would be Cindy’s job…she keeps the books). Things have fallen into his lap as a “birthright” and he’s been allowed to mask his political gadfly/playboy image as that of a maverick.
Is he dumb…or does he have dumb luck? Both.
Punchy
OT:
Now that (according to the US) AQ has attacked Yemen embassay/hotel/mud hut, how long until they raise the Colored Scare Thing (no, not Obama)? Do they just say “fuck it” and go right to red? Start screaming about duct tape and tin foil?
The Grand Panjandrum
John McCain isn’t dumb. He’s lazy. His entire life has been about himself, and just happened to have the bad fortune of being shot down and captured. BTW he was tortured during the first 2 years of his captivity. When Ho Chi Minh died the more enlightened regime members knew they had bargaining chips in the POW’s and stopped the torture in order to put those chips into play.
Former POW John McCain is the ultimate narcissist. Everything in his life has been about him. Period. Had he not been the son and grandson of Navy admirals he probably would have not been accepted to Annapolis.
He has capitalized on every association in his life and accomplished little. Maverick reformer my ass. He doesn’t reform shit until he get busted doing something unethical, illegal or immoral.
What kind of man’s leaves a severely injured wife who stood by him during his captivity once he has a chance. Fuck McCain and the filthy fucking swine he is. He’s NOT DUMB. He’s a selfish, self-centered, spoiled rat bastard. He’s too fucking lazy to be stupid.
tBone
Phil Gramm? Carly Fiorina? Douglas Holtz- Eakin? They may not be rookies, but I don’t think I’d put them in the “win” column for McCain.
bago
I dunno, marrying Paris Budweiser and buying a congressional seat seem to have worked out so far.
Rick Taylor
Put it this way, he’s never sounded particularly bright; especially when you compare him to Obama. Boy this feels like 2000 all over again, when the not-very-bright Bush ran against the very intelligent Gore, and Republicans successfully branded him as arrogant. Boy, I sure do hope that the last eight years have convinced enough voters that maybe it’s a good idea to have an intelligent person running the country.
charlotte
Is McCain stupid? As that hockey kid from Alaska might say: “Fuck, yeah!”
Stuck in the Fun House
I don’t think he’s dumb, at least no dumber than any other republican. The problem I see is someone who, in an obsessive bid to be president, has scrambled his persona into an omelet of wingnuttia doctrine mixed with his lifelong contrarian notions that often went against the GOP code as it is today. And now he can’t keep it straight in his own head what he actually believes, or what he’s supposed to say. In other words he’s one crazy Mofo.
b. hussein canuckistani
You guys need an equivalent to the modern monarchy for your country – a symbolic figurehead with no actual power but all the pomp and circumstance where people who just want the title and the applause can go and not do any harm.
Keith
Tell that to John Rambo!
farmgirl
A Mom Anon:
Someone recently (sorry, no idea where) was raising medical concerns because apparently McCain was an amateur boxer and did a LOT of drinking when he was young. These things, especially in combination, come back to bite you in the ass.
Calouste
Under Cheney is was heading that way.
jvill
I hate to be one of those gossipy people…
But in all honesty, an insider political-type friend from DC had told me on a few occasions, before McCain began his campaign, that the conventional wisdom around our fair capitol city is simply that Senator McCain isn’t very bright.
Never was, never will be.
Tony J
Dumb? I don’t know. But what’s very clear is that he really, really wants to be President, but is in his 70s, and is the candidate of a Party that simply cannot win an election on the issues that matter because it’s core voters are batshit insane and demand equal insanity from its leaders.
The facts above are not unconnected, and explain how his campaign has developed.
Shorter – You run for President with the supporters you have, not the one’s you wish you had.
Redhand
What a dumbf*ck, really. Even if he knew banking and finance wasn’t in his committee’s jurisdiction, did he really think he could get away with this sh*t?
BTW, he was against the AIG bailout before he was for it. Not that I’m a friend of AIG (a despicable company) but this guy is the biggest say-anything-to-be-president whore I’ve ever seen. He makes Bubba’s ’92 “I feel your pain” stuff seem sincere.
Next trick: Talking out your ass nonstop over the next 24 hours to try and make beople believe you’re in favor or financial market oversigt and regulation, when everything you’ve ever done has been in favor of irresponsible deregulation.
F*ck You, John McCain
Darkrose
McCain really reminds me of my mother, who turned 72 this year. She’s been living with my sister for the past six months, during which time she’s become convinced that someone’s recording her phone calls, moving her things, giving her shots at night so that she’ll sleep, and threatening to kill her.
I love my mother, but I sure as fuck don’t want her to be President.
Saint Michael Traveler
No, John McCain is not dumb? He says what it takes to get elected.
The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 450 points today. Let us be optimistic, Bush-McCain are in charge. We only have lost near 1000 points this week alone. McCain beleives our economy is great. He likes us to think about Sarah Palin and Paris Hilton.
He does not believe: The issues for USA are poor economy, broken infrastructure, exported professional jobs, lack of medical insurance for many Americans, homelessness, and over burdened borrowing from other nations.
Does McCain realy believe his own words? It does not make a difference! How dumb are we to believe him?