The Washington Post ran a story on McCain's temper over the weekend, but the piece seems to be falling apart amid accusations that the reporter distorted, exaggerated, and perhaps even fabricated some of the events he described. McCain aide Mark Salter responded yesterday that:
If one half of it were true, it would give me pause. As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction.... The story about the Young Republican in 1982 is entirely fictional. The Bob Smith incident is entirely fictional. The Karen Johnson story is entirely fictional. Most of the others are exaggerated beyond recognition.
Salter also claims that his own words were taken out of context to exaggerate the details of an argument between Sens. McCain and Grassley in 1992. Now Salter's version has been confirmed by former Senator Bob Kerrey. Jonathan Martin reports that Kerrey disputes the Post's account, which had him intervening to prevent the argument from turning physical:
"First, I did nothing to intervene; the two Senators worked it out on their own," Kerrey wrote in a comment posted this morning under his name at 7:45.... The two senators were both "extremely angry," Kerrey adds, but McCain was "at no time threatening." Kerrey, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton backer, concludes: "My experience is that [McCain's] anger always has a purpose and in this case the purpose was to defeat Senator Grassley's argument which he did decisively."
Everybody knows McCain has a temper, but none of these events seems to have happened the way they were reported, if at all. Still, and maybe it's just the warmonger in me, I tend to think McCain's disposition is more of an asset than a liability. Don't the American people want a president who's actually pissed off when he gets a phone call at 3 am saying the Iranians, or al Qaeda, or William Ayers (or all three working together) have just killed a bunch of Americans.