Monday, October 20, 2008

Now That's Some Family Values We Can Believe In, My Friends.

Oh. My. File this under "And that's just the transition team! Wait till you get to who he chooses for the A team."


McCain recently named John Lehman to oversee his transition effort and figure out how a McCain administration ought to get started—and whom it ought to hire for the most senior jobs—should McCain win the November 4 election. Lehman, now an investment banker, was secretary of the Navy during the 1980s, and he played a R-rated role in the Tailhook scandal....

In his 1995 book, Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, Greg Vistica, the San Diego Union-Tribune reporter who broke the Tailhook scandal, described a scene from the 1986 Tailhook meeting:

When the door to the suite at the Las Vegas Hilton opened, a prominent member of President Ronald Reagan’s administration and a naked woman were clearly visible. He was lying on his back, stretched out in front of a throng of naval officers. There were probably one hundred men watching him, laughing with him….
Several of the Navy and Marine officers now crammed into the room…knew him personally and worshiped him. Many knew he was married and had three children. Almost everyone knew who he was, which made the show that much more fascinating….
Most of the officers in the room, including the man on his back, were hard-drinking renegades. Some had been partying for days, others for hours. The carpet was spongy and damp from alcohol spilled on it by drunken military men. The room itself reeked with the odor of booze and sweat. But nobody seemed to care much. All eyes were on the man and the naked woman standing over him, wagging her bare rump in a teasing motion. The men in the room went into a throaty uproar at the site, and their cheers and laughs grew louder as the show went on.

The man on the floor was Lehman. And this was the example he was setting at this particular Tailhook convention. Another account of the Tailhook scandal--The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal by William McMichael--noted that Lehman ate whipped cream out of the stripper’s crotch.

I think I broke my disbelief drive.