Joe_schome, a simple google search shows dozens of articles on the number of planes McCain has destroyed. Also you forget to mention that McCain's Father and Grandfather where both admirals in the US Navy...I am pretty sure that if a regular pilot had destroyed two planes, then three, then four....they would have at the least been assigned a different role.

10/28/2008 12:24:49 PM

dude, shut the fuck up already.

he crashed two planes. one was during training. another one was of indeterminate cause. a third incident, he clipped some power lines, causing a minor local blackout. was he clowning around? some say maybe. but it wasnt a crash.

now that's it. this is not some ridiculous amount. whats fucked up is that you say FIVE.

so that means you are counting his plane that was destroyed during the fire on the USS Forrestal?? do you even know a single goddamned thing about military history? this was due to a stray, malfunctioned rocket, that discharged due to an electromechanical failure.

And youre seriously counting that McCain's destroyed plane, one of 21 planes, in an accident that had nothing to do with him, caused the worst fire and killed more sailors than any single naval accident since WWII.

HELLS FUCKING BELLS. why dont you count his friend's plane too? after being rescued by flight crew from his burning jet, John McCain tried to pull a member of his squadron from another burning jet. while doing so, the fuel tank exploded and sent a spray of shrapnel into McCains body. that jet was destroyed too. let's blame that one on John McCain as well.

and I guess you're counting the jet he was flying while on a bombing mission deep into Hanoi, when he was shot down by heavy anti-aircraft fire? yeah, obviously that's John McCains fault too. He probably trained the VC who shot him on how to aim the cannon.

goddammit man, people like you make me just about ready to change my vote to McCain because youre such a stupid motherfucker I don't want to be associated with the likes of you.






[Edited on October 28, 2008 at 1:14 PM. Reason : ]

10/28/2008 1:08:12 PM

Quote :

"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. "

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_mccain_crash_five_planes_did_he.html

Of course, factcheck.org does make mistakes

10/28/2008 1:11:41 PM

here's a great piece from christopher hitchens on palin's contempt for all things science. some of it is rather frightening (not that that's surprising though)

Quote :

"Sarah Palin's War on Science: The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning. By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not." It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research. In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.) With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us. Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4." This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity."

http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/

10/28/2008 10:24:27 PM

Christopher Hitchens is an atheist.
i.e. his opinion doesn't count

10/28/2008 10:46:13 PM

shit!

you're right. good call

10/28/2008 10:49:37 PM

that's a beauty of an article, jwb.... what's interesting, though, is that Hitchens' article was posted on Monday, yet joe_schmoe wrote on the same very topic on Sunday.

now, i'm not going to be all alarmist and say that Hitchens plagiarized me, but you know, some times people "borrow" things...

i'm thinking i should get some money out of this.



(by the way, Hitchens was on Larry King on Friday. he looked drunk. but he still was able to demonstrate quite handily that Lars Larson was a total douchebag.)




[Edited on October 28, 2008 at 11:20 PM. Reason : ]

10/28/2008 11:06:06 PM

[i]Dear TWW,

Science hurt my brain and made me do very tough math problems working out equations. God would want me to save future generations of American youth from this evil torment that is often used to preach satanic theories like Evolution! This money instead of on researching fruit flies can surely be used to help mentally handicapped kids like my boy, assist struggling CEO's in this rough time in Wall Street, purchase plenty of pretty dresses for me to wear in public, and help start a prayer in the classroom programs to encourage our youth to be reverant. Remember Palin & McCain 08!


<3 ,

Sarah Palin xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

10/28/2008 11:29:43 PM

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/these_guys_really_hate_science.php

Dr. Myers points out that this is a pattern with McCain and Palin that leads to a disdain for science spending overall. McCain is also (http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/10/07/john_mccain_bears/) making fun of bear DNA studies to which

Quote :

"McCain introduced three amendments to reduce funding for other projects. But he didn't vote to cut the bear study. In fact, the study cost more than he says it did -- about $5 million, not $3 million. Maybe McCain voted for the study because, as much as he may get a kick out of ridiculing it, it is not some frivolous exercise in furry forensics. Nor is it partisan. Its funding was originally championed by Republican lawmakers, and its goal is one that both conservationists and "Drill, baby drill" cheerleaders can get behind. The Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project attempts to answer basic scientific questions about one of the largest populations of grizzly bears left in the lower 48 states. How many grizzly bears live in a 12,000-square-mile area in and around Glacier National Park? What is their distribution? What's their gender breakdown? Are they breeding with bears from Canada? "

Also, let us not forget the (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/08/mccains-planetariophobia/) overhead projector McCain so spitefully laughed at during the debates was actually

Quote :

"Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI star projector: a venerable piece of precision fabricated equipment that projects the stars, constellations, and other objects inside the planetarium dome. Adler’s Zeiss is 40 years old, and desperately needs replacing. These machines are pricey, and replacing them difficult."

The hatred of science evidence in this malarky is sad and makes me angry. Luckily, these bastards are losing.

[Edited on October 29, 2008 at 9:56 AM. Reason : .]

10/29/2008 9:55:54 AM

looks like McCain still has it out for scientific research
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/07/mccain-repeats-palins-att_n_156106.html

Quote :

"On Wednesday, McCain himself grabbed for the fruit-fly swatter at a press conference to unveil his new anti-earmark legislation. After a long takedown of research into lobsters by the University of Maine that involves a "Lobster Cam," McCain, a Senator from Arizona, turned on the fruit flies, saying, "also, there's one in Paris that -- yes -- $212,000 for Olive Fruit Fly research in Paris, France.""

on a different, but related topic - wasn't it jsut a couple years ago that Representatives used to base their campaigns on how much money they could bring back to their States and Districts? It used to be a good thing for a Representative to, know know.... represent his constituants and bring projects back to the area. I'm not saying that's necessarily the way it should be, but just seems odd that it wasn't that long ago campaigns were based on the idea.

1/9/2009 2:35:33 PM

im glad McCain is nickle and diming scientific research out of $200K

1/9/2009 2:48:27 PM