What, me worry?

John S. McCain III, the disastrous Republican 2008 candidate who suspended his presidential campaign and refused to take the fight to Barack Obama when he had the chance to actually do something for his country, has beclowned himself yet again:

Highlighting the discord among Republicans over President Barack Obama’s targeted killings policy, two prominent GOP senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, took to the Senate floor to criticize Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 12-hour filibuster Wednesday…

McCain said Thursday the Senate needed to conduct hearings and an in-depth debate on Obama’s targeted killings policy, “but that conversation should not be talking about drones killing Jane Fonda and people in cafes. It should be all about what authority and what checks and balances should exist” in order to combat “an enemy that we know will be with us for a long time.”

The distinguished senator’s crack about Hanoi Jane (her account of her trip to North Vietnam is at the link) got me to thinking about his own past, which in turn led to the question: why do Republicans admire this man? Most of his life, John McCain has been a disgrace to his service, to the Congress and to his country. So let’s take a trip down memory lane:

John McCain, ace pilot:

One thing’s for sure — if it wasn’t for bad luck, McCain wouldn’t have no luck at all.

McCain did lose two Navy aircraft while piloting them. One crash was found to be be McCain’s fault, the other due to an engine failure of undetermined cause.. A third was destroyed on the deck of the carrier USS Forrestal when a missile fired accidentally from another plane hit either the plane next to McCain’s or, less likely, his own aircraft, triggering a disastrous fire that killed 134 sailors and nearly killed McCain. A fourth plane was lost when he was shot down over North Vietnam on a bombing mission over Hanoi. 

A fifth alleged “crash” turns out to be a misinterpretation of a flight accident that did not result in the loss of the aircraft. McCain admitted to causing that incident through “daredevil clowning” but returned safely.

Well, what about that “daredevil clowning” with a very expensive piece of U.S. government property? Just a little youthful hijinks from the son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals who finished near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, or what?

“Clowning” in Spain, about December 1961: Those who claim McCain lost five planes – when they bother to give specific citations at all – point to an incident described by McCain, and also in Timberg’s book, as happening on one of McCain’s deployments to the Mediterranean. The L.A. Times put the date of the incident as “around December 1961,” while McCain was on a training mission flying from the USS Intrepid.

Timberg, 1995 (p. 94): His professional growth, though reasonably steady, had its troubled moments. Flying low over the Iberian Peninsula, he took out some power lines, which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral. The tale has gotten better with age. These days they talk about the day McCain turned the lights out in Spain. 

McCain described it this way in “Faith of My Fathers,” which was published four years after Timberg’s account: 

McCain, 1999 (p. 159): There were occasional setbacks in my efforts to round out my Navy profile. My reputation was certainly not enhanced when I knocked down some power lines while flying too low over southern Spain. My daredevil clowning had cut off electricity to a great many Spanish homes and created a small international incident.

The L.A. Times, which interviewed others who were in McCain’s squadron at the time, reports that he returned to the carrier with 10 feet of power line trailing from his plan, and with a severed oil line. But while McCain himself admits this incident was cause by his own “daredevil clowning,” he landed safely and did not lose the aircraft. McCain’s detractors should scratch that “crash” off their list. 

Despite the incident in Spain, and the earlier finding that McCain was to blame for the Corpus Christi crash, McCain was promoted to full lieutenant on June 1, 1962.

Hardy har har.  This is the kind of thing that, if you’re not as lucky as McCain, gets innocent people killed. Also, it’s more than a little curious that, with a record of irresponsibility like that, McCain was promoted in 1962. Or maybe not, given what his father was doing at the time:

From 1960 to 1962, McCain held commands in the Atlantic, including Amphibious Group 2 and Amphibious Training, and served on Taconic and Mount McKinley. He was Chief of Naval Information from 1962 to 1963, initiating the post and garnering influence with the Washington press that would aid his career. Following the April 1963 loss of the nuclear submarine Thresher, he explained to the public why the search for the wreckage would be lengthy and difficult, and defended the Navy against charges that it had been tardy in disclosing details of the disaster. McCain was promoted to vice admiral in July 1963, and was made commander of the entire Amphibious Forces, Atlantic Fleet.

It’s good to have friends in high places, especially when they’re blood relatives, not to mention superior officers. And that bit about sucking up to the press corps indicates that the acorn didn’t fall very far from the oak. But let’s move on. We’ll pick up some romance tips from the suave Arizona senator on the next page.

The Obama administration, I believe, will come to rue the day it declared war on the dean of the Washington press corps, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. Now, I have never met Woodward, although I’ve been friendly with Carl Bernstein, the other half of the Watergate duo, for many years. But from what I know of both men, and of the journalists of their generation, I believe them to be good old-fashioned reporters for whom the story is everything. And if this is the moment when the last remnants of what used to be the American journalistic establishment dig in their heels and finally draw the line on rank partisanship — well, it’s about good and goddamned time.

It’s axiomatic today that “mainstream” journalists are corrupt tools of the liberal ascendancy, ethical roundheels who finally found Mr. Dreamboat in Barack Hussein Obama and have spent the years since 2008 lying on their backs and moaning. And that’s partly true. Obama was the culmination of everything they had wished for since the civil-rights movement, which to journalists of a certain age is the equivalent of Mao’s Long March, the event by which they define themselves. He was black, but not too black; indeed, were Obama a Republican (stop laughing) he’d be pilloried on the Left as an “Oreo,” black on the outside and white on the inside. He had gone to all the right schools (Columbia and Harvard), and yet he had a legend-ready exotic background (the “narrative”) that distinguished him from the usual private elementary school/Exeter/Yale progressives. Punahou? Who knew anything about Punahou? (Well, I do, but that’s a story for another time.) And the fact that his middle name was redolent of the culture that had wantonly attacked us on 9/11… bonus!

All those things are true, and yet — speaking as someone who began his journalistic career in 1971 — they are more true of the younger generation(s) of journalists, kiddies like the Juicebox Mafia ideologues masquerading as reporters, for whom leftist attitude is everything, especially when it is put to the service of the Democratic Party. That is to say, I hope and pray that some of us old coots still believe in the reporter’s core mission: to find out the truth and publish it. Period. That the thrill lies in the hunt, and it doesn’t matter which variety of big game you’re hunting as long as you bag it.

So return with me now to those glory days of 1972-74, when “Woodstein” was chasing the biggest story of their lives. Those of us in the profession (I was working at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle at the time) were enthralled by what the lads were doing — not running Nixon to ground or even, ultimately, bringing him down, but getting their stories on the front page every day. That was the true mark of journalistic success, and everything else was commentary. Our ethics were not those of The Party Line, but of The Front Page:

It really does appear that the Left wants to engage on the subject of “gun control” — or, to use their latest euphemism, “gun safety.” Led by two of the unloveliest of their specimens — Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dick Durbin of Illinois — the emboldened progressives clearly feel the time to strike against Americans’ Second Amendment freedoms is now, while the shooting iron is still hot.

The Right’s natural reaction when confronted is, of course, to cut and run. Being liked is far more important than being right, and as for standing on principle, that went out the window with the Gipper long ago. Indeed, the history of the modern GOP is one of pre-emptive surrender, reaching across the aisle and fleeing from any kind of direct confrontation with the Democrats in a desperate attempt to pacify them and their natural allies, the Ivy League-educated national media, better known (in Orwell’s famous phrase) as the Pansy Left. With even alleged Tea Party stalwarts like Marco Rubio earning strange new respect by coming out foursquare in favor of Amnesty Lite, movement conservatives might be forgiven for thinking they’ve been defeated across the board, and that the country they grew up has all but vanished.

That’s why the battle over firearms — which as far as the Left is concerned has only one true objective, which is the complete abolition and confiscation of guns in civilian hands — is so important, because it’s a fight conservatives can actually win. And, in winning, can make many new friends among hitherto reflexive Democrat voters who (thanks in large part to the GOP’s inarticulateness) haven’t realized that “progressives” do not and never will have their best interests at heart. And what could be more in one’s interest than self-preservation?

Just look at the disgraceful video from the DHS above. About the only tactic it forgot to include — other than “bring your own gun to unsafe environments and know how to handle it responsibly ” — was Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.

The problem right now is that, in the fight over personal firearms, the Right has lost control of both the narrative and the vocabulary. When I was growing up in San Diego, it was a common sight to see kids carrying their air rifles or even the .22s they got for Christmas as they headed into the hills around Mission Valley to go rabbit hunting; today, some busybody would call the SWAT team. Attending high school in Honolulu, I was part of a JROTC program and nobody was shocked to see a young teenager in a khaki uniform carrying around an M-1 training rifle (the firing pin had been removed) or a .22 out to the shooting range. For us, “gun control” really was all about shot groups. Schools as “gun free” — i.e. “free-fire” — zones? Not on your life.  Had there ever been an “active shooter” on the campus of St. Louis High School back then, 400 guys would have gone to their lockers or to the armory and shot the sonofabitch out of his socks.

What the Left has managed to do, however, is to convince a significant voting bloc — white, educated, affluent urban professionals — that the mere presence of a firearm within reach will suddenly set off an uncontrollable urge to go postal.  ”I just wouldn’t trust myself to have a gun in the house,” I often hear my lefty friends say, and of course with an attitude like that, I wouldn’t trust them either, so perhaps it’s just as well. They also consistently confuse the issue by nattering on about such non-existent things as high-magazine clips, and confusing the term “semi-automatic” with “machine gun,” whether ignorantly or, more likely these days, willfully. Playing on people’s fears, they seek to both disarm and unman the populace, leaving everyone entirely dependent upon yet another government entity, in this case the police.

No, not this guy:

Gee, Officer Krupke…

These guys:

… never mind

Now, one thing conservatives need to stay away from is the trope that firearms are needed to protect innocent members of the Michigan Militia and Aryan Nation white-supremacist compounds in Idaho from the black helicopters patrolling the skies in the service of the ZOG in Washington. The heavily armed cops of today are a response to two events, both of which conservatives ought to use in their favor. The first is the upgrade in weapons that the bad guys use, part of the eternal arms race between good and evil. The second is the residual effects of the “war on terror,” whose ineluctable end result has been to make every cop a RoboCop.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has now released her hit list of weapons that would be banned under her proposed “gun control” legislation. They include the usual suspects, including the AK-47 rifle — which is only the most widely used rifle on planet Earth — and the dreaded AR-15, a weapon that strikes fear and terror into tender hearts just at the sight of it.

Nowhere on the list, though, do I see “police service revolver” — the .38 caliber handguns that were standard issue in American police departments for decades, and which were in use in November of 1978 when former San Francisco city supervisor Dan White shot and killed mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk with one of them. And it is this tragedy, coming right on the heels of the Jonestown massacre (in which 918 people were killed, mostly by drinking poison), to which Sen. Feinstein, in a bitterly ironic twist, owes her entire state and national political career.

I know, because I was there, working as a reporter and chief classical music critic for the San Francisco Examiner.

The murders came as the city was reeling from a solid week of worsening news from Guyana, where congressman Leo Ryan and several others had been murdered during an ambush at the Port Kaituma airstrip as they prepared to fly back to the U.S. Among the dead were an Examiner photographer, Greg Robinson, with whom I had recently worked on a story; another of our reporters was badly injured. San Francisco — where Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple had been headquartered until it fled to the jungles of Guyana — was just returning to normal.

On the morning of Nov. 27, 1978,  I left the Examiner offices early in the morning to catch a plane for Chicago, where I was covering the world premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera, Paradise Lost, at the Lyric Opera. I went directly from O’Hare Airport to the Lyric in order to attend that afternoon’s dress rehearsal, and immediately ran into several of my national colleagues, who greeted me with: “What the hell is going on in San Francisco?”

I assumed they were talking about Jonestown, which just that morning had finally ceased to dominate the front pages of the city’s newspapers. (The headline in the first edition of the Ex that day was something like, “Trade Deficit with Japan Widens.”)  But no — they were talking about something else.

… and no comment.  I’ll leave that up to you guys. (H/t: Real Clear Politics.)

That’s “Mr. Madden” to you, bud

This might come as a surprise to you, but that Texas Republican who’s threatening legislation to jail any gun-grabbin’ federales with a mind to violatin’ the Second Amendment in the Lone Star State actually has history on his side.  Here’s the story:

A Texas lawmaker says he plans to file the Firearms Protection Act, which would make any federal laws that may be passed by Congress or imposed by Presidential order which would ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms or limit the size of gun magazines illegal in the state, 1200 WOAI news reports. 

Republican Rep. Steve Toth says his measure also calls for felony criminal charges to be filed against any federal official who tries to enforce the rule in the state. 

“If a federal official comes into the state of Texas to enforce the federal executive order, that person is subject to criminal prosecution,” Toth told 1200 WOAI’s Joe Pags Tuesday. He says his bill would make attempting to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

And here’s the precedent:

In the Roaring Twenties, after the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, Prohibition was the law of the land — but it wasn’t necessarily the law of the states.  After an initial burst of enthusiasm for shuttering bars and raiding breweries, many cities and states lost their appetite for local enforcement once they started hearing from their constituents, including the gangsters who’d quickly taken over the lucrative black market in booze. So they simply stopped enforcing the law, figuring if the feds wanted to give it a try, that was their problem.

When my friend Hugh Hewitt starts bashing the Republican “leadership” as spineless jellyfish largely AWOL on the most important issues of the day, you know we have reached a crisis point:

The Speaker’s and Leader’s staffs, however, don’t show any obvious signs of understanding the new media order or the relentlessness of the president’s program. The president or Vice President Biden uses every day to push their agenda forward and belittle or divide the GOP. Every day. Yesterday the Obama machine, supported by its permanent allies in the Manhattan-Beltway media elite, acted to get the focus off the Hagel and Lew nominations and the Holder hold-over and they used Joe Biden and his “executive order” on guns to do so. Today will see a different part of the carnival throwing up different aspects of stories or new story lines altogether.

Yesterday, as the day before and the day before that, there was no sign of any GOP leader anywhere, on the nominations, on the “executive order” on guns, on the key nominations. No appearances. No statements. Just crickets.

Those crickets would be the American people, just itching for a fight with Obama and the Democrats but finding no one to lead them. If the conservative ranks seem dispirited in the wake of the last election, it’s not because we lost — it’s because we didn’t fight. Didn’t pay the slightest attention to Churchill:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,

Instead, somebody named Willard Mitt Romney pretended to run for president in a dozen states or so, predictably lost, and vanished back to his little shack in La Jolla, leaving not a trace of his candidacy except the holes in the GOP donors/suckers’ wallets.

I’ve got mine, Jack

Last night’s vulgar stunt by somebody named Kathy Griffin, performed on somebody named Anderson Cooper in the course of “covering” the happens-every-year ball drop at Times Square for CNN, should rightly mark the end of the network as a serious news outlet. (You can watch it here.)

No one should be surprised.  CNN and indeed much of American journalism, has been heading this way since advent of the Snark Generation — Harvard-educated princelings who, having failed to land a writing job on The Simpsons, took their tiny little sacks of tricks into the mainstream media, spreading out from the late Spy magazine (which really was funny early in its run) to New York, Vanity Fair and even my old alma mater, Time magazine. In short order, gossip was elevated to the status of news, serious cultural journalism vanished in the what’s-hot-now haze and “attitude” supplanted judgment as a hallmark of distinction.

Well, you get what you pay for, as the saying goes. But CNN should pay a high price for this little stunt, as indeed it’s already doing; were it not for its monopoly on airport TV screens and its dominance, via CNN International, of overseas hotel television, it might already be out of business. In retrospect, the network’s high-water mark came during the first Gulf War — you remember that one, the one Bush Sr. didn’t finish. It’s been downhill ever since: anchorcritters who make Ted Baxter and Ron Burgundy look authoritative, election coverage with a panel full of B-team analysts and “strategists,” and an overall level of discourse better suited to the third grade.

But this is what comes of gleefully abandoning one’s standards, as American journalism did once it renounced “objectivity” and proudly endorsed the Leftist agenda of non-judgmental society wrecking. Unable to draw meaningful distinctions, or to contextualize the news in a PC-free way, CNN and its fellow MSM outlets can no longer tell the truth because they no longer know what the truth is.

… or, do as I say, not as I do, Hollywood division:

Okay, it’s easy to say that they’re just actors. Jamie Foxx is not really killing all those white people in Tarantino’s Django Unchained — via the magic of movie-making, he’s just pretending to kill them. And Jennifer Garner isn’t really shooting those Arabs in The Kingdom, she’s just playing a role. And Jeremy Renner — a splendid action hero, even if the last Bourne installment was a plotless dud — would never in a million years think of gunning down Boston cops while robbing Fenway Park (as he did in The Town), unless his pal Ben Affleck (on his way to becoming a great director) asked him to for his art.

And good for them for doing so.

But with President Obama promising to put “gun control” in the legislative crosshairs in 2013, it’s instructive to watch various actors both miming heroism and then denouncing the very tools with which they perform those heroic acts. For years, Hollywood has been forced to assert that films have no influence on the larger culture — unless, of course, it’s advancing various pet lefty causes under the “tolerance” rubric — and that therefore they cannot “inspire” various psychotic punks to acts of horrific violence.

And I agree. As John Milton writes in the Areopagitica:

TO THE PURE, ALL THINGS ARE PURE; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception, RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving the choice to each man’s discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate…

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

In other words, to a soul predisposed to evil, everything can be an occasion of sin. To the feeble-minded losers who fancy themselves Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, everything looks like a black trench coat:

You talkin’ to me?

…and he is the Gannett newspaper chain (for which I once worked, decades ago), which offers this helpful example of “service journalism” for its readers in Westchester and Rockland counties, New York — the names and home addresses of pistol permit holders in the circulation area:

The map indicates the addresses of all pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Each dot represents an individual permit holder licensed to own a handgun — a pistol or revolver. The data does not include owners of long guns — rifles or shotguns — which can be purchased without a permit. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so.

What possible use can such a map serve? You can start by asking this woman, who’s already getting quite a backlash from her readers. Discuss among yourselves, and have a Merry Christmas.

UPDATE: Where are the Journal News employees in your neighborhood? Find out here.