John McCain does not have the temperment to become president. He is a vengeful vigilante and compulsive liar who has trouble controlling his temper. These and other severe personality disorders are due in large part to the five-plus years he spent as a POW in Viet Nam. The psychotic behaviors McCain exhibits are a result of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We really cannot trust this crazy old codger who has lost touch with reality. For more see: Old McCain Should Buy a Farm – Not Become President.
In fact, many of these charges about McCain’s mental illness were originally raised by the Bush campaign back in 2000. At that time, Republicans clearly were worried about McCain’s PTSD and related emotional instability. Now, eight years later and the evidence is clear that McCain is even crazier and less stable. Our world will be in real trouble if this loose cannon and his redneck sidekick are elected. Time to send this discredited old cultural warrior back to Arizona to spend his golden years in a rocker like other diabled senior citizens.
During his speech in Denver, Obama stated “If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.” I feel that as a country we need to have this debate over McCain’s mental and psychological health (as well as his very advanced age) – even if the Obama Campaign is unwilling at this point to raise such questions directly.
I have been a social scientist for over two decades. I understand many of the underlying issues in this debate over McCain’s temperament. I feel strongly that his whole approach to the world is excessively agressive and hostile – clearly dark clouds hang over his mind and soul from his years of torture. Read on and see if you agree that McCain’s best days (which weren’t that great) are well behind him. He can’t be allowed to drag our country into his PTSD-induced fantasies and nightmares.
We need an optimistic and positive president …
We need Obama’s Fresh Ideas and Inclusive Approach!!!
Do we want Peace or More Wars??
The Choice Has Never Been More Clear!!
No Way – No McCain – No How!!
Mad McCain Losing his Mind, Soul and Integrity.
What’s in John McCain’s medical records? By Mark Benjamin May. 22, 2008
He released information about his repeated cancer surgeries. But he won’t release his psychiatric records, which hold clues to the effect of his Vietnam captivity. Presidential candidate John McCain has survived three plane crashes, four melanomas, and more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, enduring torture and solitary confinement. There would be questions about his health and his fitness for the office he seeks even if he weren’t turning 72 in August, and even if he weren’t likely to be running against a man 25 years his junior.
During the five and a half years of captivity that followed, McCain was held in solitary confinement for two years straight, inflicting psychological strain the senator has described as worse than a beating. He memorized the names of POWs, details of guards and interrogators and reconstructed books and movies in his mind. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” McCain wrote in “Faith of My Fathers,” his 1999 memoir. “I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me to a place in my mind from which I might fail to return.” …
During McCain’s first White House run, his unsuccessful battle with George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999 and 2000, he faced a whispering campaign from rivals that suggested his Vietnam ordeal had permanently damaged his psyche — specifically, that his famed outbursts of temper might be a sign of something serious, like post-traumatic stress disorder.
It is well documented that the sort of treatment McCain endured can harm the mind. A 1989 study in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, one of many studies on the subject, showed that a third of American World War II prisoners of war met diagnostic criteria for PTSD fully 40 years after their release. …
There are behaviors associated with the candidate that would be consistent with a diagnosis of PTSD. Author Robert Timberg mentions McCain’s intense explosions of anger — a hallmark sign of lingering mental trauma from war — in his book “John McCain: An American Odyssey.” Timberg describes the episodes as “an eruption of temper out of all proportion to the provocation.” Timberg, who McCain has said “knows more about me than I do,” wrote that McCain’s sudden fury is a result of Vietnam coming “back to haunt him.” McCain has himself described having an adverse reaction to the sound of jangling keys, which reminds him of his Vietnam jailers. McCain also told doctors that during solitary confinement he had strayed pretty “far out” and had referred to himself as “mentally deteriorating.” …
Enduring captivity also gave McCain another apparent psychological gift: a feeling of credibility. It finally allowed him to escape the shadow of his father, Jack, a four-star admiral who commanded the entire Pacific theater during Vietnam. “Although proud of his father, he has been preoccupied with escaping being in the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others,” O’Connell wrote on McCain’s return from Vietnam. “He feels his experiences and performance as a POW have finally permitted this to happen.” A 1979 doctor’s note in McCain’s records described this dynamic as “Oedipal rivalry.” …
However, the same psychiatrists note that despite any perceived positive effects of imprisonment, the POWs also battled ghosts. “It is for all of those guys a life-changing experience,” said Sledge, now at Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. “So many of them told me in my interviews that they had benefited from it.” But Sledge added that some of the same former POWs simultaneously suffer some negative mental consequences. “These things seem to be operating on different tracks within the human mind.”
We judge a man by the company he keeps – Bush and McCain in Love!!
Crazy old McCain means more Bush failure with side of rotten Moose Stew.
Full Metal McCain By MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone From Issue 1055 — June 26, 2008
Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the one-time maverick has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger …
Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who’s never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?
You’d never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America “backward,” to the failed ideas of the Sixties. “I’m surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!” he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, “That’s not change we can believe in!” …
But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway. …
Some of us who have been mesmerized by the Obama-Clinton cage match during the past six months may have developed certain delusions about the state of American politics, in two areas in particular. One is the idea, much pushed by wishful-thinking media commentators like myself, that the abject failure and unpopularity of the Bush administration somehow means the Republican revolution is over, and the mean-ass hate-radio conservatism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is finally dead. The other is the even more quaint notion that the historic, groundbreakingly successful candidacies of a black man and a woman have ushered in a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness. It’s bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics..
McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style. …
McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said. ..
This dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation of McCain offers the vehicle for his new platform, which is just the same old ring-around-the-collar fear-mongering horseshit used by a generation of conservatives, warmed over to fit 2008. In fact, in his stump speeches these days, McCain never veers off a strikingly Bushian binary version of reality, in which the world is divided into clear-cut camps of God-fearing American good and un-Christian, bomb-tossing foreign (and foreign-enabling) evil. …
Break it down and this is basically the same old label game, with McCain trying to rally his crowds against all the major isms: terrorism, socialism, elitism, anti-Americanism. … That’s it — that’s the entire argument. McCain is a canny enough old goat to know that the public’s insatiable appetite for traitorous enemies will do the rest. He’ll wave as many flags and stand in front of as many fucking fighter jets as you like, while the other guy lectures us about why he doesn’t always need to wear a flag pin in his lapel and calls a bomb-throwing Sixties terrorist “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” instead of calling for his immediate beheading. …
What’s especially creepy about this flashback this time around is that it seems to mirror the tragic loop in McCain’s own psyche. For all his frantic recanting of the many embarrassingly bipartisan episodes from his Senate past, McCain has never betrayed even a nanosecond’s worth of memories from the central catastrophe of his life: his capture and torture in a Vietnamese prison. But now that he is finally pitted, in the great battle of his life, against a smooth-talking peacenik nearly half his age who wants American troops to withdraw instead of pressing on for “victory” in an unpopular war, McCain can keep reliving all those old hurts and all those old battles over and over again, in front of sympathetic crowd after sympathetic crowd.
Never mind that Iraq isn’t exactly Vietnam, or that Barack Obama isn’t Jane Fonda — what matters is that the Republicans nominated a wounded old soldier who now gets to spend the next five months trying to exorcise his personal demons, and this serendipitous circumstance fits nicely with the party’s national strategy, despite the fact that pinning these old hurts on the likes of Obama makes no sense at all. Still, it’s not hard to hear, in McCain’s quasi-coherent rants, his bitterness at being abandoned to years of savage tortures while millions of little Hillarys and Bills and Obamas-in-training were getting high and balling each other during the Country Joe and the Fish set at Woodstock, instead of standing up and saluting the “winnable” war effort that got McCain sent to Vietnam in the first place. …
We all recognize John McCain’s Navy service and the years he spent as a POW in Vietnam. Lesser persons, including myself, would have not survived the experience of such torture. What has not been discussed is McCain and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder. McCain did and does suffer from PTSD. PTSD certainly puts his emotional explosiveness in context. One does not get over PTSD; it isn’t like the common cold. Rather, at best, one learns to live with PTSD.
So the following questions present themselves: (1) Has McCain received the necessary therapy to bring his PTSD under control? (2) What impact will McCain’s PTSD have on his ability to make considered, objective decisions as Commander in Chief? (3) Can McCain handle the stresses of the presidency in view of his PTSD and his age? It is revealing that McCain has yet to release his full medical records. Is it possible he is not releasing these records because they demonstrate his unfitness for service? Probably.
McCain PTSD question valid
Letter to the Editor – 08/13/2008
Remember the 2000 election when McCain challenged Bush for the Republican presidential nomination? Isn’t that precisely what McCain’s fellow Republicans were implying when they called him “emotionally unstable because of his prisoner of war experiences”? His Republican colleagues also talked about his violent, explosive temper and the filthy language he often uses. And remember these were not comments made by Democrats but by Republicans from McCain’s own party.
Now fast forward to 2008, and this emotionally unstable, bad-tempered, foul-mouthed candidate is the Republican party’s best hope for continuing Bush’s plans for America. McCain wants to make Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent; he plans to open up off-shore drilling; and he wants to legalese 20 million illegal aliens, all of which he originally opposed but has since “flip-flopped” on and now supports.
McCain also wants to continue Bush’s profitable little war in Iraq, profitable because Bush supporters like Blackwater, Big Oil, and Halliburton and its subsidiaries have made billions from the war. And now that Big Oil is being given contracts to “develop” Iraq’s oil fields, they will be getting even richer. But we mustn’t think this was a war for oil anymore than we should think McCain’s “emotional instability” equals PTSD. No, sir!
McCain says because he survived 5½ years of brutal torture, while a prisoner of the communist Vietnamese, he is better qualified to be president of the United States than any other candidate. McCain claims his POW sufferings included three years in solitary confinement where he was tortured so badly that he “broke,” causing him to attempt suicide. What McCain’s promoters have carefully edited out of their McCain-for-president equation is his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Department of Defense psychiatrists have evaluated McCain for PTSD several times, the results of which remain locked by privacy laws.
PTSD can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which physical harm occurred or was threatened. U.S. government studies have concluded that former POWs “may remain embroiled in a harsh psychological battle with themselves for decades after returning home.” An outcome of PTSD is a subtle web of personal problems including difficulty in controlling intense emotions such as anger and an inability to function well under stress. …
Over the years, countless numbers of columnist/pundits have nearly drowned in their own drool suggesting McCain’s POW experience greatly qualifies him to be president. Washington Post columnist George Will once wrote that because McCain was such an “obstinate” POW hero resister, he was kept “in solitary confinement most of that time … Every day for two years, one of his guards ordered him to bow, and then knocked him down.” …
Unfortunately for McCain, the baggage that accompanies understanding “the deepest level” of torture and especially “attempted suicide” is the psychological trauma known as PTSD. During McCain’s 1999 presidential campaign, he carefully controlled the release of some “redacted medical records” in what appeared to be an effort to counter discussions of whether McCain’s legendary “short fuse” temperament makes him unfit to serve as president and commander in chief of the military. His campaign did not allow any pages to be photocopied and selectively picked news organizations to examine the records. …
The doctors said McCain explained that while in solitary confinement he created for himself a fantasy world in which he lived. The doctors said McCain always heard the guards coming with his food, but “was often so much in his private world, that he strongly resented their coming around and bringing him back to reality by intruding. He was enjoying his fantasies so much.” Members of the two major POW/MIA family organizations know the “real” John McCain and they despise him. They have experienced firsthand his cruel, angry temperament.
In 1996, McCain encountered a group of POW/MIA family members outside a Senate hearing room. The family members were some of the same who worked tirelessly during the Vietnam War to make sure Hanoi released all U.S. POWs – including POW McCain. McCain immediately began quarreling with the POW/MIA family members, who were eager to question him on the issue of what happened to their loved ones.
Instead of showing courtesy and appropriate compassion by answering their questions, the Arizona senator pushed through the group, shoving them out of his way, nearly toppling the wheelchair of POW/MIA mother Jane Duke Gaylor. Her son, Charles Duke, a civilian worker in Vietnam, is among 2,300 American POWs and MIAs still unaccounted for by the communists. The POW/MIA families, shocked at McCain’s overly aggressive behavior toward Mrs. Gaylor, registered complaints with senate officials. In an earlier incident involving families of servicemen still MIA, McCain got so angry that he went ballistic. …
POW families were even more angered when they saw McCain actually bonding with his former torturers during and after the 1992 Senate Select Committee hearings on POW/MIA Affairs. Psychologist have identified behavior in which a prisoner emotionally bonds with an abuser as the Stockholm Syndrome. The first display of bonding occurred when Col. Bui Tin, a former senior colonel in the North Vietnamese Army who had actually interrogated McCain and other U.S. prisoners, testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
During a break in the hearing, McCain moved to where Col. Bui Tin was seated. Instead of grabbing Bui Tin by the neck and demanding his arrest for war crimes against U.S. POWs, McCain reached out and warmly hugged his former interrogator as if he were a long lost brother. Never mind that at least 55 American POW were murdered by interrogators and guards while in North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps. …
On a Nov. 13, 1996 trip to Hanoi, McCain posed for a picture embracing Mai Van On, one of the Vietnamese who pulled McCain from Hanoi’s Truc Bach Lake, where McCain parachuted in 1967 after his bomber was shot down. McCain has said many times that after being pulled from the lake, his Vietnamese rescuers brutally beat him and stabbed him with a bayonet.
Early in 2007, columnist Sidney Blumenthal, who once served as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, questioned if McCain’s “volatile temper” might derail his bid to be President. Blumenthal wrote that the senator’s temper sometimes surfaces in the form of obscenities: “McCain’s political colleagues, however, know another side of the action hero — a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to ‘shut up,’ called his fellow Republican senators ‘shithead,’ ‘f******* jerk,’ ‘a**hole,’ and joked in 1998 at a Republican fundraiser about the teenage daughter of President Clinton, ‘Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father.'”
Regardless of all the obvious signs pointing to McCain’s PTSD, the one outstanding fact is that McCain, by his own admission, broke under the stress of captivity and tried to kill himself. National columnists and pundits have, so far, given McCain a “free pass” on the attempted suicide. Would the other presidential candidates be treated with the same indifference if they had an attempted suicide in their biographies?
The HipHappy Times 
Pingback: McCain’s Body Language Reveals Hostility, Arrogance and Dishonesty « Dr. Tom’s HipHappy Times
Pingback: Old McCain Should Buy a Farm - Not Become President « Dr. Tom’s HipHappy Times