Clipped from European media:
John McCain, is being billed as the Republican liberals can live with. He is “a bipartisan progressive””, “a principled hard liberal”, “a decent man”…
He brags he would be happy for US troops to remain in Iraq for 100 years.
Don’t be fooled by the myth of John McCain. John McCain is to the right of George Bush across a whole range of subjects. He is the Republican candidate we should fear the most.
…
McCain is third-generation navy royalty, raised from a young age to be a senior figure in the Armed Forces, like his father and grandfather before him. He was sent to one of the most elite boarding schools in America, then to a naval academy where he ranked 894th out of 899 students in ability. He used nepotism to get ahead: when he was rejected by the National War College, he used his father’s contacts with the Secretary of the Navy to make them reconsider. He then swiftly married the heiress to a multi-million dollar fortune.…
Right up to his twenties, he remained a strikingly violent man, “ready to fight at the drop of a hat”, according to his biographer Robert Timberg. This rage seems to be at the core of his personality: describing his own childhood, McCain has written: “At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.”…
…he used his wife’s fortune to run to as a Republican senator.He was a standard-issue Reaganite corporate Republican – until the Keating Five corruption scandal consumed him. [collapse of most USA Savings and Loans] In 1987, it was revealed that McCain, along with four other senators, had taken huge campaign donations from a fraudster called Charles Keating. …pressured government regulators not to look too hard into Keating’s affairs, allowing him to commit even more fraud. …turned the scandal into a debate about the political system, rather than his own personal corruption.
Oh, there’s more…an über-hawk on foreign policy:
To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: at a recent rally, he sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”. He says North Korea should be threatened with “extinction”.