I’ve heard all the news about how most Republicans don’t like McCain despite the fact that they all love him now because he’s going to be the nominee unless Cheney & Rove can figure out a way to stop that from happening. I’m kind of hot and cold on the guy. I like the fact that he’s not beholden to party politics. I like that he’s a moderate conservative because, in some respects, I am one as well. Every now and then, he says something that just kills it for me. Like the ‘hundred years in Iraq’ comment. I know what he meant, and I still don’t like it.

One thing I’ve noticed about McCain’s public speaking is that he always seems so calm. Not real calmness; when he’s debating someone he disagrees with it’s like every sentence is preceded by an imperceptible deep breath. I get the feeling there’s anger under there, intense anger. I don’t know if it’s the look on his face, tone of his voice or what. It’s something in his overall demeanor that makes me think he would just assume throw something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-inducing, but instead he swallows it and talks in much the same voice teacher or parent might use with a mid-tantrum child who won’t listen to anything rather than throwing something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-, long-prison-sentence- as well as cocktail-party-punchline-inducing. As I found on Wonkette today, I may not be alone:

• McCain “often insults people and flies off the handle,” the New York Times reported.
• The Arizona Republic was writing about his “volcanic temper” the last time he ran for president, in 1896 1999.
• His former colleague in the Senate, Republican Bob Smith, says McCain is a nutter: “I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues … He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We’ve all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I’ve never seen anyone act like that.”
• Former Congressman John LeBoutillier, another Republican, says this: “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”
• Basically everyone on Capitol Hill has been the victim of McCain’s sociopathic tirades, and many have the apology letters from McCain to prove it.
• “Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the Senate, where McCain has few friends or supporters. In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him,” writes the conservative website NewsMax.
• When two Arizona medical doctors met with McCain to discuss a local endangered squirrel, “He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room …. He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us.”
• Says another GOP colleague in the Senate, “I Didn’t Want This Guy Anywhere Near A Trigger.”
• A furious McCain regularly throws F-bombs at his colleagues for no apparent reason.
• In 1995, at the Capitol, McCain had a “scuffle” with 92-year-old Republican Senator Strom Thurmond. That’s right, McCain tried to beat up the one person who was even older than McCain himself.
• “It was election night 1986, and John McCain had just been elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time. Even so, he was not in a good mood. McCain was yelling at the top of his lungs and poking the chest of a young Republican volunteer who had set up a lectern that was too tall for the 5-foot-9 politician to be seen to advantage, according to a witness to the outburst.”
• “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Republican Senator Thad Cochran said about McCain. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”