1. A high-ranking Senate staffer said of Senator McCain, "Whenever we see someone wearing their flip-flops, we say, 'I see you have on your McCains today.'"
2. McCain said that in his presidential campaign this year he was going to, "raise the level of political dialogue in America, and I'm going to treat my opponent with respect."
3. Arch-conservative senator from Mississippi Thad Cochran has said of him, "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine."
4. Conservative movement leader David Keene has said of him, "In McCain's world, there aren't any legitimate differences of opinion. There is his way and there is evil."
5. Former New York Republican Representative John LeBoutillier has said of him: "People who disagree with him get the 'fuck you.' I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president." He has also said, "He is a vicious person."
6. Libertarian Matt Welch once wrote an article for Reason magazine called, "Be Afraid of President McCain: The Frightening Mind of an Authoritarian Maverick."
7. He told a woman on Senator Dennis DeConcini's staff who had once contradicted him in a meeting at DeConcin's retirement party, "I'm so glad you're out of job, and I'll see to it you never work again."
8.When he picked Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate, "he told America to go fuck itself," in the immortal words of New Republic books and arts editor Leon Wieseltier.
9. He once told a joke about a woman being mauled and raped by a gorilla. When she regained consciousness, she asked the attending physician, "What happened to that marvelous gorilla?"
10. He once told a joke about Chelsea Clinton that went, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."
11. He once called his second wife, Cindy McCain, a "cunt" in public.
12. If he becomes Chief Executive and dies in office, Sarah Palin will become president.
13. During the South Carolina primary in 2000, McCain volunteers dressed up in Confederate uniforms and passed out fliers stating that McCain supported flying the Confederate flag over the Capitol building.
14. McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. Twice.
15. McCain helped engineer the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which strips detained terrorism suspects of all due process rights and gives the president latitude to interpret the Geneva conventions prohibiting torture as he sees fit.
16. Neoconservative intellectual Bill Kristol has been one of McCain's top advisers for a decade, and McCain has embraced the neoconservative perspective on American foreign policy, which is, as the scholar of right-wing postmodernism Shadia Druly has written, "not about resisting aggression, but about belligerence."
17. The following prominent conservatives have explicitly endorsed his opponent Barack Obama, primarily based on the two candidates' contrasting temperaments and judgment: Christopher Buckley, Wick Allison, Ken Adelman, Colin Powell, Ken Duberstein, Andrew Sullivan, Francis Fukuyama, David Friedman, Megan McCardle, Andrew Bacevitch, Jeffrey Hart, Larry Hunter, Dorothy King, Douglas Kmiec, Scott Flanders, and Charles Fried.
18. The following prominent conservatives have implicitly endorsed Obama over McCain: George Will, Peggy Noonan, Heather Mac Donald, Scott Flanders, and Nancy Reagan. (I wish I could include Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks here, but Krauthammer has withdrawn what seemed like an implicit endorsement of Obama, and Brooks has not dared go all the way.)
19. Chris Buckley, son of Bill Buckley, said: "Obama has in him...the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment calls for."
20. George Will wrote about McCain's behavior at the height of the financial crisis:
"One candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama."
21. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, said that Obama "symbolizes the ability of the United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way."
22. Conservative colmnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that Obama has a "first-class intellect and a first-class temperament."
23. Larry Hunter, former chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who helped put together the Contract for America, wrote that Obama has the potential to "scramble the political deck, break up old alliances, and bring odd bedfellows together in a new coalition," and called the Republican Party a "dead, rotting corpse with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies."
24. The Atlantic coverlined an article about John McCain by Jeffrey Goldberg, "Why War Is His Answer."
25. He sang a cover of the Beach Boys' song "Barbara Ann" that went, "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran! Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran!" in response to a question at a town hall meeting about his policy toward Tehran.
26. Supporters of al-Qaeda on the website al-Hesbah have endorsed McCain, saying that if al-Qaeda wants to exhaust the U.S. militarily and economically, "This requires presence (sic) of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier."
27. Annapolis classmate and fellow POW Phillip Butler has said of McCain, "Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to the nuclear button."
28. Former Republican Senator from New Hampshire Bob Smith has said, "McCain's temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger."
29. Pat Murphy, former editor of the Arizona Republic, wrote back in 2000: "If McCain were to become president, Americans would wake up to more than a commander-in-chief with a prickly temperament and a low-boiling point. McCain is a man who carries get-even grudges. He cannot endure criticism. He controls by fear. He's consumed with self-importance."
30. Even Karl Rove has questioned the veracity of some of McCain's statements about Obama in this campaign, saying they go "too far" and fail the "truth test."
31. Former Republican Senator from Rhode Island and past McCain ally Lincoln Chafee has said, "John has made a pact with the devil."
32. Even as a very young child, McCain had uncontrollable temper tantrums. "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious," his autobiography reveals.
33. McCain's nickname in high school was "McNasty," and a friend of his from that time recalls him as a "mean little fucker."
34. He graduated 894th, fifth from the bottom, out of 899 graduating cadets in his class at the Naval Academy.
35. Cruising with two friends one night during high school, McCain told some girls who rebuffed them to "stick it up your ass," and then when he and his friends were hauled into juvenile court, allowed one of them to take the rap for what he had said.
36. At the Naval Academy, he allowed another midshipman to take the blame for one of his infractions of the rules. The Naval Academy has an honor code.
37. While he was in the Navy before Vietnam, his thrill-seeking and self-described "daredevil clowning" caused him to crash three different planes, a record that would probably get him expelled from the Navy today.
38. McCain makes it sound as if he was the only American prisoner to refuse the North Vietnamese offer of early release, but many of the POWs were tendered this offer and all of them refused it.
39. McCain makes much of his success in passing so-called campaign finance reform, but the most relevant response to the Keating Five Scandal, and the bankruptcy of Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan, would have been to pursue better regulation of the banking industry. His course over the next twenty-plus years was to help pursue greater deregulation of the industry.
40. McCain told the Wall Street Journal that he is "always for less regulation."
41. McCain claims in his autobiography that before his imprisonment he thought that "all glory was self-glory," and that prison taught him "there are greater pursuits than self." Ross Perot, however, who made knowing and helping Vietnam-era POWs a special cause of his, said recently: "McCain is the classic opportunist. He is always reaching for the attention and glory."
42. Perot is still angry at McCain for discarding his first wife Carol in favor of the young, rich, socially and politically well-connected Cindy after he came home from North Vietnam. Perot had financed the extensive medical care Carol required for the crippling injuries she suffered in a car accident while her husband was away.
43. McCain's second wife, Cindy, was for several years an addict who stole drugs from her own charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT). Tom Gosinski, a high-level employee of AVMT at the time, perceived Cindy as a "sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator" drove her to it.
44. After "suspending" his presidential campaign, allegedly so he could go the Washington to help craft a solution to the financial crisis, McCain sat through a lengthy meeting at the White House about the bail out package being considered and didn't say a single word the whole time.
45. He has admitted that, though he has been in Congress since 1982, he has never bothered to learn very much about economics.
46. McCain claims a strong identification with the character Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the novel, Robert Jordan was essentially fighting on the side of the Spanish equivalent of the Communist-dominated South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, with which America was at war when McCain served in the Navy.
47. His wife Cindy has to choose, and buy, her husband's gifts to her, herself.
48. New York Times columnist Frank Rich has noted, "McCain's top officials and fundraisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia."
49. When Russia invaded neighboring Georgia, John McCain called it "probably the most serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War." Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, was previously a lobbyist for the nation of Georgia.
50. McCain currently has employed as many as 164 lobbyists in important positions in his current presidential campaign.
51. David Letterman remarked, "Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think there will be other things down the road, like if he's in the White House he just might suspend being president."
52. As Obama said regarding McCain's desire to suspend his campaign and skip the second debate, "A president has to be able to do more than one thing at once."
53. In 1993, McCain voted for an earmark of $100 million to fund a search for extraterrestrial life.
54. McCain, an inveterate gambler, has more than 40 fundraisers and advisers who have lobbied for gambling interests. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, is one of them.
55. New Republic writer John B. Judis has written, "McCain's status as hero is wrapped up with the kind of nationalism most dramatically inspired by a quasi-religious understanding of foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil."
56. New Republic writer Jonathan Chait has said, "McCain views himself as the ultimate patriot. He loves his country so much that he cannot let it fall into the hands of an unworthy rival."
57. Joe Klein of Time has written, "John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign."
58. As John B. Judis has further pointed out, "McCain's recitation of his own heroism is contrary to the ethos of heroism."
59. As Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria has written regarding McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be first in line for the presidency should he die or be incapacitated: "John McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, he did not."
60. McCain once physically roughed up 92-year-old Strom Thurmond on the floor of the Senate during a dispute.
61. A major leader of the American conservative movement once remarked to me, "If you liked the way Tom Delay ran the House of Representatives, you'll love the way John McCain will run the White House."
62. As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has written, "John McCain wants us to think he's a man of character, when he actually is just a character."
63. McCain threatened to "destroy" Maricopa County, Arizona Superintendent of Schools Sandra Dowling if she did not retract her endorsement of a primary rival of his favored candidate. Dowling refused, and soon thereafter her son lost his appointment to the Naval Academy.
64. McCain once proclaimed, "I'm Luke Skywalker heading out for the Death Star!"
65. McCain has stipulated he would appoint only "pro-life" candidates to the Supreme Court.
66. He has said he would appoint Supreme Court judges in the mold of Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.
67. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich has pointed out, "McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries' names wrong, forgets things he has said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused."
68. McCain supports privatizing Social Security, which, since it is a government insurance program, would mean destroying it.
69. Rick Davis, John McCain's campaign manager, said during the Republican Convention in September that this election "is not about issues."
70. John McCain was endorsed by Dick Cheney this past weekend.
71. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan has predicted: "McCain will make Cheney look like Ghandi."
72. The Children's Defense Fund has rated John McCain the worst member of Congress for children.
73. When John McCain was in training to be a Navy pilot, he dated a stripper named "Marie the Flame of Florida."
74. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the largest group of Iraq Veterans in the country, which rates member of Congress on how well they actually support American veterans and troops in the field with their votes, has given John McCain a grade of D.
75. John McCain has voted against every attempt to raise the federal minimum wage in the last decade.
76. Conservative columnist George Will wrote of McCain's "Manichean worldview": "For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are 'corrupt'--there are no other people."
77. Maureen Dowd asked, "Why would he threaten to not show up for a debate (after denouncing Obama for not rising to the challenge of joint town halls) so that he could go to Washington and play the shining knight if he had no plan and no prospect for success?"
78. I have been studying John McCain's history intensively for two months now, and I have not come across one act of human kindness or generosity he has ever performed in his personal life.
79. McCain claims that his foremost historical role model in politics is Teddy Roosevelt. But it was President Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed a progressive income tax and an estate tax in order to mitigate great disparities of wealth in the country. McCain favors complete repeal of the estate tax, and lowering income taxes on the wealthiest segment of society even further than under George W. Bush.
80. McCain voted 95% of the time in favor of President Bush's policies in 2007, and 100% of the time in favor of his Iraq policy.
81. Despite considerable evidence that a significant number of American POWs were not returned by the Vietnamese after the Paris Peace Treaty in 1973, John McCain fought unrelentingly to prevent the U.S. Government from seriously investigating or addressing this issue. Some of his very worst outbursts of temper have been in reaction to criticism of him on this score.
82. In his autobiography Faith of My Fathers, John Sidney McCain III recounts with pride the service of his slave-owning great-great grandfather William Alexander McCain in the Confederate Army, and ruefully remarks that the young age of his great-grandfather, John S. McCain I, prevented him from serving in the rebel cause.
83. When asked by the press how many houses he owns, McCain was unable give a figure.
84. When asked by the press whether he thought health insurance plans that cover Viagra for men should also cover birth control for women, McCain said he didn't have enough information on the subject to give an informed answer--even though he had voted twice in the Senate against requiring insurance companies to do so.
85. John McCain spent his 70th birthday aboard the yacht of international criminal Rafaello Follieri, which he boarded in Montenegro. McCain was joined by his 2000 and 2008 campaign manager Rick Davis, a lobbyist for Follieri as well as for the government of Montenegro.
86. A McCain campaign ad accused Obama of favoring full-scale sex education for kindergarten children when he was in the Illinois legislature; the truth was that the bill in question would have instructed children in how to recognize and deal with possible sexual predators.
87. McCain offered to enter his wife Cindy in the annual "Miss Buffalo Chip" striptease contest at a Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally, saying he would like it if she were the only woman ever to be both Miss Buffalo Chip and First Lady.
88. McCain's Chief of Staff and long-time aide Mark Buse was recently outed as being gay--which would be no big thing, except for the fact that McCain has been an unwavering opponent of gay rights in the U.S. Senate, and also voted against the Hate Crimes Bill.
89. "I know that a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, of undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know than an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without international support will fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruiting arm of Al Qaeda."--Barack Obama, 2002.
90. Jonathan Chait observed in The New Republic, "McCain has presented himself as the grizzled champion of timeworn values. But the defining characteristic of his candidacy has been a postmodern disdain for truth."
91. During his first run for the House of Representatives in Arizona, John McCain threatened to beat up one of his opponents in the Republican primary.
92. McCain once called up a sixty-three-year-old female constituent who had written the Senator a letter chiding him for his attitude toward Anita Hill, berated her over the phone for questioning his integrity, then slammed down the receiver.
93. McCain once called up the editor of the conservative Arizona Republic after the paper had published an article that was critical of how he dealt with the state's Democratic governor when she went to Washington to testify before Congress and screamed at him, "I know you're out to get me!"
94. During a congressional trip to Nicarauga in the 1980s, McCain went over to a Sandanista government official who had said something he didn't like, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him angrily.
95. McCain is 72-years old, has had skin cancer four times, and is part of a demographic group--ex-POWs who were brutally tortured--for which the actuarial tables are not good, and he chose Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential candidate.
96. McCain once explained to a fellow ex-POW, while he was still married to his first wife Carol, why he was on his way down to Rio De Janiero: "I got a better chance of getting laid."
97. "At a time when America's estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with its enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind's spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between those worlds may be indispensable," conservative thinker Andrew Sulllivan wrote in his Atlantic article, "Why Obama Matters."
98. Congressman Bobby Rush of Chicago, against whom Barack Obama made his first (and unsuccessful) try for political office, has said: "I think Obama, his election to the Senate, was divinely ordered. I'm a preacher and a pastor; I know that was God's plan. Obama has qualities that--I think he is being used for a divine purpose. I really do."
99. Tom Morris, 73, a retired truck driver and electrician and lifelong Republican, told a canvasser who came to the door of his trailer in Perry County, Ohio: "I think God had it all planned out, for Barack-O to be our man." His 82-year-old friend Rufus Fultz, a retired coal miner, added behind him: "I believe it too."
100. Beth Moriarty in Orlando, Florida, when two Republican canvassers came to her door looking for her husband, told them: "Ya'll are totally at the wrong house. My husband, he's 62, he has never voted for a Democrat in his entire life. Until Tuesday."