Anxious to stir the global pot, this week John McCain has been among Miami’s Cuban diaspora touting his experience as a fighter pilot. In 1962, turns out he was assigned to the USS Enterprise which was sent to help respond to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today’s headline in Cuba’s official newspaper propaganda organ appears below:
Brief translation:
Identifying himself as a hardliner against Cuba, Senator McCain broadcast on Miami radio that he was a pilot “during the Missile Crisis” where he found himself “on the bridge of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier,” adding that, therefore, “I understand Cuba.”
Fools rush in.
A presidential hopeful could hardly plan a worse way to begin a relationship with Cuba. American politicians have been saying they understand Cuba for at least 200 years. Sadly, history shows their vocal volume and understanding are inversely related. The louder they shout, the less they actually know. John McCain’s Miami naive braggadocio is a dark omen that flags him as uniquely unsuited for the Oval Office.
Speaking of naiveté, probably 99% of today’s U.S. college students haven’t heard of the Missile Crisis, yet it’s a factor, again, in our choice of a President. Until a month ago, White House spokesperson Dana Perino hadn’t heard of it either.
When Perino admitted as much during a game show appearance in December, intellectual derision erupted from a host of liberal pens, temporarily darkening the blogosphere. Among the scandalized lefties was one William Fisher who intoned (Huffington Post, “What Did She Learn in High School?”) how, in 1962
. . . I was a young, eager, and very low-level [Kennedy administration] functionary . . . thrilled that someone higher up thought enough about me that they assigned me a secret spot in a secret tunnel in a secret mountain in North Carolina - in case the entire government had to relocate . . . .
Fisher allowed that “the Kennedy administration certainly wasn’t perfect” and could have used “a few people with gray hairs,” but insisted that
. . . the huge preponderance of the president’s 3,000-plus political appointees were people who had spent their entire adult lives preparing for the jobs they got. They really knew what they were doing [and were] by and large . . . dedicated and . . . competent.
As if he, as a young staffer with stars in his eyes, would know the difference. Anyway, Fisher recounts, for those in Rio Linda, how
[The Missile Crisis] was arguably the Cold War’s scariest threat of Mutually Assured Destruction . . . when U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev faced off over Soviet ballistic missiles being stationed in Cuba, 90 miles from the Florida coast. Long story short: Nikita blinked first and M.A.D. was averted.
Long story short, indeed! Smug in his own place in and understanding of history, Fisher found it just
. . . bizarre that the president’s press secretary never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After all, she’s an educated person — Ponderosa High School, the University of Southern Colorado, grad school at the University of Illinois, work on the Hill, and so forth . . .
and expressed his “fear” that
. . . history will look back on the time of George W. Bush . . . as a time of American arrogance, American exceptionalism, and America’s abandonment of its most dearly treasured principles . . . [and that] the judgment of history will serve to strengthen right-wing canards about government not being able to do anything right.
Fisher finishes with a supplication that “the next administration will choose people who can get it right.”
Amazing that in so few lines, Fisher could serve up so many delicious ironies. I’ll come back to them in a future post. For now, I’ll dangle a bit of Dana’s bio here and ask you how this person could get where she is without having heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis:
Perino was born in Evanston, Wyoming, and grew up in Denver, Colorado. She attended Ponderosa High School in Parker, Colorado, a suburb of Denver.[1] Perino graduated from the University of Southern Colorado (now known as Colorado State University-Pueblo) in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in mass communications and minors in both political science and Spanish. While attending the university, Perino was active on the debate team and with KTSC-TV, the campus-based Rocky Mountain PBS affiliate where she served as host of Capitol Journal, a weekly summary of Colorado politics, and producer of Standoff, a weekly public affairs program. From there, Perino attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). Perino obtained her masters at UIS in Public Affairs Reporting while also working as a daily reporter covering the Illinois Capitol for WCIA-TV, a CBS affiliate.
Click here for Fisher’s full text.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
karen 01.26.08 at 12:50 am
Well! So McCain confesses that “during the Missile Crisis” he found himself “on the bridge of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.” That helps a lot.
We knew he had been out to sea all along. But now we know the kind of vessel.
So if we can correlate his first hand experience with Cuba to his understanding of economics, he knows all about it from offshore.
fritz 01.26.08 at 3:19 am
McCain sounds like he’s an expert on Cuba (from offshore on that aircraft carrier– mind you, it WAS a clear day) just as much as a thrifty tourist in Paris who’s been at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, looking up. Somehow, on returning home, the tourist “knows” the view from the top, because he has stood at the bottom. … Come on, John. That’s about like offering us Jack Kemp as assurance that the economy will be in good hands.