Home | Notes
Contributors
Archives | Search
Links | About
contact:
editor@ExileStreet.com
..........

Ralph Peters
Latest

Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World
Ralph Peters

..........

Julia Gorin

Clintonisms
by Julia Gorin

..........

Wounded Warrior
Please Help Those
Who Protect Us

..........

Burt Prelutsky

The Secret of Their
Success
by Burt Prelutsky
..........

.........

Burt Prelutsky

Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
..........

..........

FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Nine Feet Tall
Let The Tallest Man Win The Oval
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 7/2/08

Wesley’s Worms make for a test for the media, and the GOP. Wesley Clark’s yammering on “Face the Nation” that the presidential candidate without executive decision-making experience is retired Navy captain and fighter pilot John McCain is stepping in the kemshe right up to his eyebrows. He’s opening a can of worms that will metastasize in very pleasing ways – pleasing to us on the right.
 
Make that Wesley’s Wormhole, for it opens up a rift in political space that is Barack’s claim to New Politics, Virgin Political Purity and not doing things the same ole way. Despite Barack’s disownership of Clark’s bark, it raises issues worthy of examination:
 
Which Candidate Is Taller?
 
Which one belongs in the Oval?

If you stand the two men before a height-chart, akin to a police-blotter mug-shot camera setup, Barack soars at over six feet, and Mac at a bit less than average for his generation: 5-foot 9-inches.  If Mac could lift his arms over his head, his hands might reach to Barack’s hairline; but of course, he cannot, for while Barack spent his 20s and 30s as an ‘organizer’ in Southside Chicago politics, Mac was a recovering POW at that same mile-marker in his life, healing from massive wounds resulting from his ejector seat injuries as a prelude to ‘checking in’ at the Hanoi Hilton. Plus the poor ‘health care’ provided by the People’s Republic of North Vietnam, as well as deliberate injuries by these slightly leftish folks who were the focus of Bill Ayers and other allies and ‘friends’ of the Obamas in that same Chicago precinct.
 
As one CNN moron characterized Mac’s service as “riding in a jet” we can see where this might be going in a media-monopoly world, but not likely since we’re no longer in the days of media daze, when all media all the time were in the lap and crotch of liberals, licking their tender parts with the salivating enthusiasm of courting canines. Mac didn’t ‘ride’ in a jet: he was the PILOT of a jet FIGHTER, in aerial COMBAT on a regular basis, each day leaving YANKEE STATION off North Vietnam. It’s southern cousin for similar missions was known as Dixie Station – showing those Navy flyers and commanders have quite a sense of humor, and geography, and history.
 
While the media of 1957-63 adored the ‘experience’ of JFK’s failure to avoid his boat’s sinking – and Hollywood obliged with its crotch-licking flick, “PT 109” – they seem today to accept Clark’s bark that commanding a squadron of combat planes is to be as easily dismissed, and dissed, as did the left regarding Dubya’s experience as a trained pilot in an interceptor squadron. While they complain of ‘swiftboating’ of Kerry, the boat brigade on the left is quite experienced at the mis-measuring of men for high office.
 
As they let JFK get away with branding Eisenhower as ‘soft on defense’ and thus created the myth of a missile-gap and bomber-gap [yep, it was JFK and the DNC, not militaristic fascists who created that clever contrivance], so the media is inclined to let Barack’s Brigade of branders put a sizzling label on Mac’s ass as not really all that experienced, after all, at military command, and decision-making, and handling the angst of tough environments. One lefty blogger noted, with casual citation by CNN, that it’s No Big Deal to be “shot down” and serve your youth in a commie cell.

Here’s the height test, for those in the media, and among my allies on the right who are ignorant of these matters [note: ignorance is not the crime; Mark Twain noted, we’re all ignert, just about different things. The Crime is letting the ignorance be your guide, rather than filling that mental pothole with facts.]: Mac stood nine feet tall one fiery day on the flight deck of the USS Forrestal. A co-worker served as a radar operator on the Forrestal after this deck inferno, some months later, and noted to me this week that the metal was still distorted, bent, scorched months later.

A small error led to a hundred deaths of crew on the Forrestal’s flight deck, when static charge ignited a wing-mounted rocket amidst a deck full of fighters readied for a strike against commie targets.  Those would be the folks which Barack’s “neighbor” Bill Ayers touted and admired, along with the public AAA-gun antics in North Vietnam by Jane Fonda. That static-triggered rocket set off explosions which ripped the planes and deck and covered the deck with burning, spreading aviation fuel.

And that fuel spread over the deck beneath John McCain’s A-6 Skyhawk, as he sat trapped in the cockpit, surrounded by the outline of burning fuel beneath him. This for a man who’d often survived AAA over Indian Country [enemy areas], as well as SAM launches – the Anti-Aircraft Artillery [AAA, or triple-A] never got him, but the surface-to-air-missile {SAM] did play the ‘golden BB’ role, some time after the flight deck fire. How did this 5-foot 9-inch combat-fighter pilot act as the flames licked the underbelly of his Skyhawk?

Assessing the situation and acting was not new to Mac – he daily bread of duty was at least one ‘cat’ and one followup ‘trap’ on that flight deck. After a combat mission with elevated heartrate and other medical signs of stress, his highest stress was after crossing the beach into blue-water safety. To go forth for the mission, his A-6 had to catapult on steam-powered acceleration into the South China Sea sky, thus a ‘cat’ to get into the air. Then came the combat mission, and returning to a ‘trap’: his plane had to be trapped by a cable catching his plane’s tailhook in a controlled crash that allows for only a two-second window from the first cable, or wire, to the fourth and last wire awaiting him on the rear of the flight deck.

This was the ‘experience’ of this man who is labeled by the CNN moron as “riding” in a jet: daily cat and trap, with combat in between, and then do it again the next day. Stress cubed, and cubed again. Decisions every day that would make Barack and Michelle wither like greenhouse orchids in the noonday sun in Phoenix. And what of the fire? From his cockpit at a height of nine feet, John McCain heard his maintenance chief ‘recommend’ he jump to the deck and into the roiling inferno, tuck and roll – and to do it NOW!  And from that height of nine feet, with flames all around him below, Mac instantly did exactly as he had to do.

And when he dropped, hit the deck after a nine foot fall, and tucked, rolled and exited the flames, himself on fire, and put out by awaiting extinguishers brandished by his crew, what did he do? He HELPED FIGHT THE FIRE. For hours. And when flight ops were ready, off he went again, on another cat and trap.

These things he did DAILY, for WEEKS and MONTHS – before he was ever a POW.  From a height of nine feet, Mac knew more of the heights of decisions than most military officers, in war or peace, and four hundred billion times more than Barack and Michelle will ever imagine in their most fervent mental accelerations.

My fantasy for this campaign is that somehow Barack be lured into a ‘flyaround’ on a carrier: buckle up in a modern fighter, as a ‘ passenger’ and take a ‘ride in a jet’ and do a cat, then experience a few barrel rolls, some hammerhead stalls, maybe an Immelman or two, add in a Thach Weave, plus an inside loop and a few other standard combat maneuvers of the category which were the daily duty of Lt./Lt. Commander McCain.  Then hit the deck in a controlled-crash trap, and follow that with DOING IT AGAIN a few hours later.

As John McCain did, though Barack’s flyaround would be missing the intervening combat. But with one additional difference: Mac wasn’t “riding” the jet, he was the GODDAM PILOT, every day, for years. Longggggg before he was shot down. Which is why he so instantly assessed that fire around him, and jumped from a height sixty percent higher than his own mug-shot measurement.

After Barack’s eye-opening [and bowel-opening?] flyaround and a trap, or two, maybe he’ll understand what real decision making is.

And while Barack is suiting up, arrange a flyaround for Clark, and Hillary, and maybe even ole Billy Boy.  [Maybe a CNN yapper or two!] While Barack measures on the mug-shot wall as over six-feet tall, in the real-life, tough-assed world of What Men Do, in pursuit of Doing Their Duty, Mac is

NINE FEET TALL.

And the Oval’s ceiling is just barely high enough to make room for this pilot to “ride” as president. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

§