ANGERED BY Sen. John McCain’s, R-Arizona, gibes at the House, some House Republicans warned that they will never again support his proposals, a Capitol Hill weekly, The Hill, writes this week.
"‘It will be a cold day in hell before I vote for anything he’s sponsoring,’ said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho. ‘He has lost any credibility in the House that he ever had.’
Seems the House members are little touchy about him calling them names.
"House members’ ire was triggered by McCain’s recent appearance on the David Letterman late night show when he ridiculed House members as ‘real profiles in courage’ and folks who ‘head for the hill’ after the House shut down because of the anthrax scare while the Senate stayed in session.
Rep. Peter King, New York, one of the few Republicans who supported McCain during last year’s GOP presidential primaries, told The Hill that he was "very disappointed" in McCain’s comments, even though McCain said he was only joking.
"I’m really disgusted with the Senate and... John as an individual," King said. "It was a sorry time for the Senate. They showed themselves to be a bunch of pompous windbags."
"King insisted that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, ‘definitely did the right thing,’ (to shut down the House) given the fact that anthrax spores were later discovered in two House office buildings.’
"House members say congressional leaders agreed to shut down both the House and Senate after anthrax was discovered in Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, offices and 22 of his staffers subsequently tested positive for exposure. But Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, has denied there was any deal.
The Hill writes that McCain described his remarks as humor. "‘I’ve said on numerous occasions that humor was a vital part of my existence during stressful times in my life, and I will continue to indulge in it," said McCain, a Navy pilot who spent six years as a North Vietnam prisoner of war.
"Asked about McCain’s comments, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, without skipping a beat, jokingly took a jab at his own son. ‘Well, Patrick’s a wimp, OK?’ said Kennedy.
Spooked journalists
THE WAR IN Afghanistan has barely begun and already some journalists are seeing the ghost of Vietnam.
"Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad," the New York Times’ R.W. Apple wrote Wednesday in a news analysis.
"Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia," Apple said.
"For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable. (On Tuesday), for example, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed for the first time that American military forces are operating in northern Afghanistan, providing liaison to ‘a limited number of the various opposition elements.’ Their role sounds suspiciously like that of the advisers sent to Vietnam in the early 1960s... The Vietnam advisers, of course, were initially described in much the same terms," said Apple.
