Quote:
Originally Posted by ngdawg
Unless you have some sort of "in" with the Senate, I'm still betting that what isn't shown on tv, shouldn't be.
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Is working there for two years an "in" (granted, it was a long time ago)..and never, not once, hearing breaches of protocol and decorum anywhere comparable to McCain's outbursts (he was in the House at the time). I dont doubt that it goes on in private discussions among Senators...but not on the floor and not in caucus or committee meetings.
I still have an "in" but far less these days, but it is common knowledge among the Senate, on both sides of the aisle, that McCain's is far and away the body's number one hothead.
-----Added 1/9/2008 at 08 : 12 : 25-----
And its happened outside of the Senate, according to one Republican colleague:
Quote:
John McCain engaged in a physical confrontation in 1987 with a left-wing Sandinista leader during a diplomatic meeting in Nicaragua, according to one of his colleagues, Sen. Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican....
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Cochran told the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., on Monday that he'd witnessed a confrontation between McCain and a Sandinista leader that shocked him, in which McCain "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."
...Cochran typically measures his words and his actions carefully. But he drew wide national notice in January (of this year) when he told The Boston Globe his judgment of his longtime Senate colleague McCain.
...."The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Cochran told the Globe. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
The two senators have since made peace...
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But he also said that he'd observed McCain engaging in a physical tussle with a Sandinista while on a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987...
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The atmosphere was tense, as the United States was pressing "pretty hard." Cochran said he noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.
"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table, and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."....
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Cochran said he supported McCain and that the Arizona senator had turned into the best presidential candidate he could have imagined. McCain is levelheaded now, Cochran said. He thinks that McCain, whom he described as courageous, hardworking and better equipped to handle the nation’s current challenges, is a better choice for president than Democrat Barack Obama.
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 07/02/2008 | Senator: Angry McCain grabbed Sandinista official at talks
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Has he mellowed with age? Who knows? Old habits are hard to break...and the thought of a US president with such`a volatile temperament is troubling to me.