JOHN THE JERKOMANIAC

In her tribute to Bill Buckley, Mona Charen lauded not only what he had accomplished – a "profoundly consequential life" – but what he was as a human being:  "by universal acclimation, the most gracious man on the planet."

"It was always Bill," she observed, "who rushed to get a chair for the person left standing" at a meeting.  "Always Bill who reached to fill your glass" of water.  "Always Bill who volunteered to give you a lift wherever you were going, insisting it was on his way."

With his usual impeccable timing, Bill Buckley chose to leave us at just the opportune time to contrast the gracious humanity of the founder of America's conservative movement with the personality of the man claiming conservatives should support his nomination for President of the United States.

The Democrat Party and its candidates, Mrs. Bill Clinton and Hussein Obambi, have the neurosis possessed by all liberals – Infantilizomania, the obsessive compulsion to treat adults as children.

The presumptive candidate of the Republican Party has a different type of neurosis – Jerkomania, the obsessive compulsion to be a jerk.

The examples of McCain being a jerk are limitless.  Here's one provided by George Will:

"When [Bradley] Smith chaired the Federal Election Commission, he voiced skepticism about the wisdom and constitutionality of aspects of McCain-Feingold's campaign regulations. McCain responded characteristically, impugning Smith's character. When, at a 2004 Senate hearing, Smith nevertheless extended his hand to McCain, McCain refused to shake it."

The latest example is McCain's public trashing of Cincinnati radio talk show host Bill Cunningham.  You know the story.  At a rally for McCain this Tuesday (2/26), Cunningham was asked to do a warm-up, get the audience revved and excited, which is just what he did – repeatedly using Obambi's full name and calling him a political hack.

Pretty mild, actually, but McCain was incensed.  So instead of doing the classy thing – not mentioning Cunningham's comments at all, then later in private telling his aides to make sure this doesn't happen again – he publicly denounces and humiliates Cunningham right there on the stage, announcing:  "I repudiate what he said."

What an insufferably self-righteous no-class jerk.

The only way for McCain to overcome this is for conservatives, when they think of him, to think of Cordell Hull.

Cordell Hull (1871-1955), was FDR's Secretary of State for 11 years (1933-44) and Nobel Peace Prize laureate for co-founding the United Nations.  In 1940, as part of FDR's "Good Neighbor Policy" towards Latin America, he negotiated a treaty of cooperation between the US and the Dominican Republic known as the Hull-Trujillo Treaty.

Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961), was the blood-stained dictator of the DR known to his people as Chapitas or "Bottlecaps" because of the mass of phony medals on his chest.  He was the prototypical Banana Republic strongman who demanded absolute obedience and would wipe out anyone who didn't give it to him.

Yet he hated both Communists and Nazis,welcomed Jewish refugees from Europe, and was a staunch supporter of the US and the Allies against Hitler.

Thus Cordell Hull uttered his famous comment about Trujillo after signing the treaty:  "He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch."

John McCain is our son of a bitch.

In other words, America needs a jerk, needs a president who is a son of a bitch towards the mullahs of Iran, Moslem crazies, Saudi Wahabbis, the Chicoms, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin.

The last thing we need is a Kumbaya president so bottomlessly naïve that he thinks his sweet talk and bottomless appeasement can cause all these nasty folks to love us.

Or a bottomlessly corrupt president who would sell out her country for her own or her party's political advantage – as did her husband when he sold classified military technology to the Chicoms in Beijing for donations to the Democrat Party.

Yet this kind of  reality politics is unlikely to overcome McCain's challenge of generating conservative passion for such a fundamentally unlikeable man.

Then there is the sobering conversation I had today with a fellow in Poland.  Let me tell you about him.

Born near Cracow, Poland in 1941, Dawid Mariusz Dastych joined the Polish Foreign Intelligence Service, run by the Soviet KGB.  After various assignments in Western Europe, in 1967 he was sent to Hanoi, North Vietnam, where he worked closely with other Soviet intelligence agents.

In 1968, he was reassigned back to stations in Western Europe.  In 1973, he was recruited by the CIA.  After 14 years of being a valuable double agent for Langley, he was arrested in 1987 and sentenced by the Polish Communist Military Tribunal to eight years in prison for spying for the CIA.  After three years in Barszewo prison, he was released in 1990 with the liberation of Poland from the Soviet Empire.

David (English for Dawid) confirmed to me that GRU Soviet Military Intelligence officers ran the North Vietnamese prison system holding American POWs during the Vietnam War.  While John McCain was not one of the prisoners he saw, he did personally see other American pilots who had been "broken" by the GRU.

David cannot confirm "T's" story that McCain cooperated with his captors as told in How The Clintons Will Destroy John McCain, since I cannot reveal T's identity.  Nonetheless, he concludes that:

"My knowledge of the circumstances at that time was pretty good.  Therefore, I can say that this ‘skeleton' in McCain's closet is probably true."

As far as the GRU archive traded to the CIA in 1991 thought to contain transcripts (translated from Vietnamese to Russian by T) of McCain's collaboration, David believes they exist, using the technical abbreviations in referring to them:

"I think that the Clintons may have an access to the mIN CORE COD (Continuation of Government) secret data base to compromise John McCain."    

This is not confirmation of McCain's collaboration.  It is still circumstantial, albeit independently corroborating.  I personally hope it is not true.  All I am issuing here is a warning that this may be true – certainly a handful of Congressmen believe it is based on their talks with T – and if it is, and if it can be substantiated, then McCain's candidacy will be destroyed.

So better to find this out now, one way or the other, well before the nominating convention locks it for McCain – after which the Dems unload an ultimate October Surprise and they take the White House in a walk.

We cannot afford that.  Obambi would be eaten alive by Putin, or any of a host of America's enemies, for a breakfast snack.  Much better to have a Jerkomaniac in the Oval Office who could kick Putin's ass.

So we cannot just hope the stories of McCain's collaboration aren't true.  We've got to demand that McCain release his Pentagon debriefing records which he refuses to declassify.  He's got to put the story to bed.

And if he can't? 

Think of a Southern Sheriff advising America like he would a young miscreant:  "You in a whole heap a' trouble, boy."
 

Ps:  Okay, one Bill Buckley story, a favorite of his that he told me once.  He was at a ski resort and had just finished a run.  (He was, of course, an expert skier).  He looked up to see this fellow flailing down the slope with excruciating awkwardness.  Somehow the fellow made it to the bottom of the run without crashing and pulled up to Buckley.  It was his friend, famous left-wing economist John Kenneth Galbraith. 

Buckley asked him, "How long have you been skiing, Ken?"  Galbraith thought for a moment and answered, "Must be at least 30 years or so."  "Ah," Buckley responded, "about as long as you've been studying economics."