McCain Scrutiny

There's an excellent piece by Frank Rich in today's NYTimes, on John McCain and what a tool he is (I'd post a link, but I lack the skillz). Check it out.

Which reminded me of a little bit of McCain history that he's been getting a free pass on from the media...you might even remember it.

The time he called his wife a cunt in public.

Yes, that's right, the old POW hero actually lost it with his (much younger, much richer) spouse so badly as to viciously snap at her the worst, most offensive word anyone can use to a woman.

Leaving aside why we use physiological words as snarling epithets (prick, cunt, cocksucker...), which is a blog unto itself, I have to say I am really interested in the dynamics of this incident, and in what it says about McCain, whom I hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns. Nay, a million.

Here's a piece I found online, about a related incident from May 2008:

A man attending a McCain event as a registered member of the press was kicked out of the Des Moines town hall meeting for asking a question that working press should have asked him weeks ago: Did you call your wife a "cunt"?

The headline is typical of the kid glove treatment McCain gets from the media. McCain didn't "field the question" he kicked a member of the press out of his town hall meeting for asking a question:


McCain fields audience question on whether he called wife an expletive


REGISTER STAFF • May 1, 2008


A Clive man drew gasps from fellow audience members at today’s presidential candidate forum by using a four-letter word in a question to Sen. John McCain.


A member of the audience, identified as Marty Parrish of Clive, asked McCain during the event at the Polk County Convention Complex about a rumor that McCain had once used a profane word referencing female genitalia to describe his wife.


A book, “The Real McCain” by Cliff Schecter, accuses McCain of using the word in an exchange with his wife, Cindy, in 1992.


Here’s a transcript of today’s remarks:


PARRISH: This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I’ve been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a (expletive)?


MCCAIN: Now, now. You don’t want to … Um, you know that’s the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don’t, there’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language. So I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.


The audience gasped at the question and applauded at McCain’s handling of it. Parrish was escorted from the event and questioned by Secret Service, but not charged. Parrish had checked in to the event as a member of the press.



Parrish, a 45-year-old Baptist minister and technology business owner, said he attended the event specifically to confront McCain about the rumor.


“This is about character,” Parrish said, when reached by telephone afterward. “And in a moment of intemperance, he called his wife the most despicable name a person can call a woman.

Notice McCain didn't have the guts to answer the question. The word "no" was not, last I checked, considered profane even in Des Moines.

It's not like the McCain campaign has a policy of not responding to the cunt allegation. McCain had his spokeswoman accuse Schecter of fabrication in the New York Daily News when the Scheter's book came out:


McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker brands the book "trash journalism" and tells us, "The story is completely fabricated." [NYDN]

McCain was implicitly warning the rest of the media not to ask him questions that make him mad.

Takes a big man to send out your spokesman to defame an author and kick a preacher/citizen journalist out of your town hall meeting.

McCain is a petty little coward whose toadies are crying "ambush" for a question about an allegation that was published over three weeks ago, addressed by a campaign spokeswoman, and discussed extensively in the media and online.

This is exactly the kind of bullying that lends further credence to Cliff Schecter's account and the many other examples of McCain's peevishness, intimidation, and rage he chronicles in his book, The Real McCain.



Man! This guy is dangerously unstable. Not to mention a misogynistic beast. Can you imagine the repercussions if he used the same word against a female head of state he disagreed with? I'd love to have seen him pull that on Margaret Thatcher or Benazir Bhutto...they'd have had his nuts for earrings, and rightly so.

But the larger horror remains. He called his own wife a cunt. The context was as follows: she had been teasing him for his hair getting a bit thin in the thatch, maybe a tad bit cruel, okay. And then he comes back with "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Nice! And despite the above story claiming that this was discussed "extensively" in the media, I didn't see it. And I read a LOT.

So where oh where is the journalistic outrage, the outcry of the citizens? Quashed, nonexistent. Muffled at best.

This should have been plastered across college newspapers coast to coast. And regular journalistic outlets as well. Any man who could lose his temper so far as to call his own wife a vile name in public is not a man to be trusted on any level.

He's no statesman: he blatantly lies about his own voting record, and he still cravenly supports the now utterly disconnected (possibly even clinically so) Chimpy (yea, verily, even on that horrible piece of legislation about denying children, CHILDREN!, an extension of health care benefits that would have cost about an hour of his private little war). McCain's a piece of feculent vermin, the cloaca of iniquity.

And I want to see him trodden underfoot in November. I want to see the Boot of Karma, the Foot of Pride, come down on him and squish him into the dirt like the utter cockroach that he is.

That's all.