Robert Timberg, anyone? McCain's serial affairs, described in DETAIL, via Daily Howler:

[Gabi Hayes]

Wild, crazy sex was back in vogue when scribes told McCain's inspiring story. For years we had been treated to lurid tales about another Alpha Male's horrid sex habits. But suddenly, the weather had changed. Robert Timberg's 1999 biography of McCain was the basic resource for many McCain profiles. Timberg, describing McCain's naughty past, seemed to express a retro ethic: boys could be boys once again. Timberg described McCain's final night with that hot Rio model we've mentioned:

TIMBERG (p. 54): The following night, McCain's last in Rio, the designer who brought them together had scheduled a farewell party for McCain. He and Elena <"not her real name"> planned to go to dinner first. He arrived at her apartment about eight, knocked on her door, and readied himself to be greeted by the aunt or one of the servants. No one answered his knock. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and let himself in.

................


TIMBERG: "I'll be right in," Elena called from the bedroom.

McCain wandered about the terrace. The moon was glinting off the bay. A bottle of champagne was chilling in a bucket of ice. When Elena joined him a few minutes later, she was not, McCain would later say, dressed for dinner.

Winking admiration for McCain's racy past is found all through the press profiles. McCain's hard-drinking, crash-through-the-screen-door courtship style seemed to evoke a simpler time, when men were men—and frequently tipsy—and didn't have to talk to their girl friends. Indeed, Timberg's critique is so permissive he even extends his approval to plane wrecks. Here's his account of an amusing incident from Spain, in the early '60s:

TIMBERG (p. 68): To the relief of McCain watchers everywhere, these early glimmers of maturity did not signal a radical transformation. His professional growth, though reasonably steady, had its troubled moments. Flying too 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.

"He continued to play hard on liberty," Timberg continues, "drinking, gambling, and otherwise availing himself of the charms of the Mediterranean littoral."

We have no particular quarrel with Timberg's approach to McCain's "carousing" past. But then, we haven't suggested that McCain be judged by other parts of his early bio, and we haven't spent the last eight years clucking about Gennifer Flowers. It's hard to read the press corps' accounts of McCain's early exploits, and their discreet avoidance of his post-Vietnam extramarital conduct, without thinking of the same group's critiques of Bill Clinton—and without seeing how we expose ourselves to gross subjectivity when we judge public figures by personal events from their past.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/h031000_1.shtml

This link is from 2000, and there are lots more stories along these lines. Timberg as a guest on Charlie Rose back then, so I'm hoping his work isn't judged on the same basis as Corsi or Sampley. I don't think there was any sort of outcry when his book was released, as it was mostly admiring

check it out:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=LHBJtYOM86YC&dq=robert+timberg&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=kGjIBwvFaI&sig=qJw8uGPVXcbD0kcJKSUwLmbj6E4&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=13&ct=result

[Gabi Hayes]

1. another summary of relevant section from Timberg's book. by a nut, but if accurate.....

McCain, according to Robert Timberg in his book, The Nightingale’s Song, was transferred to Jacksonville as the executive officer of Replacement Air Group 174. A few months later, he assumed command of the RAG, which trained pilots and crews for carrier deployments. The assignment was controversial, some calling it favoritism, a sop to the famous son of a famous father and grandfather, since he had not first commanded a squadron, the usual career path.”

While Executive Officer and later as Squadron Commander, the married McCain used his authority to arrange frequent flights that allowed him to carouse with subordinates and “engage in extra-marital affairs.”

This was a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice rules against adultery and fraternization with subordinates. But, as with all his other past behaviors, McCain was never penalized; instead he always got away with his transgressions Timberg wrote, “Off duty, usually on routine cross-country flights to Yuma and El Centro, John started carousing and running around with women. To make matters worse, some of the women with whom he was linked by rumor were subordinates . . . At the time the rumors were so widespread that, true or not, they became part of McCain’s persona, impossible not to take note of.”

In early 1977, Admiral Jim Holloway, Chief of Naval Operations had to deal with the embarrassment caused by McCain’s behavior. So the Admiral transferred McCain from his command position “to Washington as the number-two man in the Navy’s Senate liaison office. McCain was promptly given total control of the office. It wasn’t long before the “fun loving and irreverent” McCain had turned the liaison office into a “late-afternoon gathering spot where senators and staffers, usually from the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, would drop in for a drink and the chance to unwind.”

http://mccainiseman.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/mccains-history-of-abusing-the-public-trust/

[Gabi Hayes]

2. is this true? should it be looked into?....more from LeBoutillier:

Dr. Jack Wheeler’s claims

Dr. Jack Wheeler, who The Wall Street Journal called “the originator of the Reagan Doctrine,” recently posted several columns about McCain. In one of them - weeks before the New York Times ran the explosive revelations about Vicki Iseman and McCain - Dr. Wheeler wrote, McCain has been having affairs with three women, one of whom I know the name of.

In his latest piece, he wrote of how the Democrats will attack McCain systematically in the fall, bleeding him drip by drip: Then the identities of the women lobbyists with whom he has been cheating on his blonde rich wife will be known by early October.

[Riddler]

3. Personally, I hope ever damn lurid word of it is true and the dems are just sitting on it,

waiting till it's too late for the repukes to get a real candidate to spring it on McLame, thus our own version of an October surprise.

[Virginia Dare]

5. I wondered if that was what was behind Edwards getting his dirty laundry

out to air now. I think they probably wanted a whole bunch of repukes on the record condemning it, including the great hero McLame. It's gonna get ugly come October.

[Gabi Hayes]

6. I don't think anybody but the media had control of this one, because my guess is

that it's to McC's benefit if this comes out now, during the Olympics, where it can be buried, then ignored as old news, come the conventions

the media has chosen to ignore EVERY egregious McC action over the decades, starting with the Keating 5, which, when you look into it at ALL, would have been more than enough to sink the career of ANY other politicican. It did, btw, take care of the other ones, including Glenn, who got off almost as easily as McCain, but his image was more tarnished than McC's, because he "came clean"

he needs to be requestioned on his involvement again, with the record brought up to date, as to his true involvement with the Keating family

[Gabi Hayes]

4. from porking it up, to porking out with Charles Keating, to the tune of over $2 billion....

fairly brief summation of just HOW culpable McCain was in the LFSL scandal, allowing it to remain open for TWO YEARS, while they milked the taxpayers of over two billion bucks, as Keating bled it dry before regulators finally closed it:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/28/amid_mccains_new_status_old_scandals_stir/?p1=email_to_a_friend

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/15498.html

As William K. Black watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.

Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.

“I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage,” said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln’s bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.

The story of how the “Keating Five” senators allegedly pressured regulators to lay off a failing Arizona S&L became a major scandal, and marked a turning point in McCain’s life - the near-death of his political career followed by his eventual rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance reform.

The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used “poor judgment” in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.

But McCain’s emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he’s accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.


much, much more at carpetbagger.com, and this isn't new, but it is being ignored/forgotten by the media, and the public doesn't remember the Keating 5 Scandal, or just what a pivotal role McCain had in it, being more closely connected to Keating than any of the other four. He also lied about it, and leaked like a broken dike to weasel his way out of more severe sanctions, than the 'poor judgmeht'
for which he was officially cited in the Senate.

"POOR JUDGMENT!!!" isn't that was this campaign has boiled down to? are the Obamas going to start quoting that sanction by the SENATE? not just some caterwauling leftwing newspaper, that, but the senate. have you heard anything from the Obama camp on this (forget about the media....they're going to have to be forced to discuss it, and the dems are going to have to be the ones to do it)? If they're keeping their powder dry, it's getting awfully damp out here these days.....

and while we're at it, time to bring this excellent article into the discussion again:

http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Pluck_leaks_helped_senator_to_overcome_S_L_scandal+.shtml

{More than a} decade ago, Senator John McCain's role in the most politically corrosive episode of the $150 billion savings and loan debacle threatened to end a political career that now holds some promise of concluding instead with a McCain presidency. Back then, McCain said the Keating Five scandal was a more nightmarish experience than his years in a North Vietnamese prison camp.


What a difference a decade makes: One mischievous commentator recently suggested that the Keating Five was a rock group. And nowadays, McCain dismisses the tawdry Senate scandal as a mere asterisk in his career, in hopes the electorate will too.


Yet the scandal remains the other crucible of McCain's career, and its every filament is likely to be picked apart if McCain wins the Republican nomination, as now seems plausible.


With the passage of time, McCain's role has come to be seen as relatively benign. But had it not been for good fortune and determination - and carefully targeted news leaks that McCain subsequently denied responsibility for - McCain might have been badly tarnished.