Word: besting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brought honor to his family name, he didn't yet have reason to believe it. "They are treating us like heroes," he told his Naval Academy roommate Chuck Larson when he got back to the States, "and all I did was get shot down and try to survive the best I could. I really want to put that behind me. What's important to me is what I do from now on. I don't want to live and be nothing but a POW." It's not that the story was a lie; it's just that no one understood...
...accident that the first four questions McCain faced in last week's Republican debate were not about Medicare or Chechnya or Microsoft; they were all about him. Just how bad is your temper, Senator, and why do some of the people who know you best dislike you most? Why are people whispering that your years in prison left you slightly unhinged...
...during that time his wife became addicted to painkillers--and he did not notice. His allies say the rough passage carved his political identity. "People get inspired to do great things by bad things," suggests Torie Clarke, his former press secretary. "In many ways being a POW was the best thing that happened to him as a person. And Keating was the best thing to happen to him as a public servant...
...from making him more sensitive, the Keating Five scandal was a near death experience that changed the way he saw himself and the system. McCain had been at best a reformer junior grade. In fact, he voted against campaign-reform measures before being sucked into the sewer himself. He used to brag about the pork he brought home to Arizona. When an opponent in the 1986 Senate race pointed out the massive campaign contributions that McCain was receiving from defense contractors, McCain accused him of running "one of the most sloppy and dirty campaigns in Arizona's history...
...problem is that up on the stage, when he tries to tell stories not about his reckless youth or his heroic comrades but about average Americans and their everyday lives, he is working with much dryer clay. He is best when he is angry, not empathic. He blazes with indignation that 12,000 military families are on food stamps while Congress approves a $325 million aircraft carrier the Pentagon doesn't want. But when the subject turns to the dining-room-table issues that top every list of voter concerns--education, health care, moral values--McCain seems to lose some...