Karl Klockars

"I'm gonna have you killed someday."

Everything in this world is documented.  It’s hard to find something happening that doesn’t have three well-lit camera angles on it.  If not, then there’s scavenged cell-phone audio, radio transmissions, iPhone camera shots, and so on.  This goes double for politicians.  Now, even though we’ve only been saving just about everything on paper since the dawn of time, we still have decades of reel-to-reel tapes (surveillance or otherwise), old 35mm film cartridges rotting in the Library of Congress, shelves upon shelves of photographs in every presidential library since…well, photography.

So it’s not surprising that we have audio of the speeches of the now-famed Reverend Wright from our fair South Side.  It doesn’t shock me at all that we have hidden cell-phone recordings of “clinging to guns and religion” as well as “the financial markets got drunk” commentary of our current president a few months ago.  Nor should it – we as a people have been familiar with hidden audio since at least the Nixon tapes back before I was even a wee lad.

All this having been introduced as evidence, I ask you this, Gentle Reader.  Where, oh where, are the audio tapes of noted hot-head and temper-flarer John McCain flying off the handle at some poor intern.  Where is the cassette containing the saved voicemails of the good Senator freaking out on a page or a staffer or a (god-forbid) donor?  Where are the tapes?

I find it hard that they’re not out there yet.  A quick search for “John McCain loses temper” comes up with an initial response of a video on YouTube of McCain losing his cool with an NYT reporter.  After watching the video, I’ve had more impassioned responses from a plate of Jello.  You’ve fooled me again, YouTube.  Damn your tagging and rating system.

The second result is John McCain losing his temper at a hearing.  Losing his cool equals being snippy at a Congressional hearing, laying down the law but…not flipping out.  I want to see absolute loopiness.  I want to see the old-white-guy equivalent of a woman taking off her high heel and throwing it.  (I love that move.)  I want to see comb-over a-flying and tailored suitcoat being peeled off and fists up in the air, old-school boxer style.  That’s the presidential candidate I want to see.

And it’s not like it’d be a negative thing.  No one particularly cared (if you look at the polls) about the Reverend Wright to-do except for talk show hosts that dive on soundbites like that as though they’d dangled a steak in front of a German Shepherd.  They can’t make the guilt-by-association train pick up that second car of Bill Ayers, although they’ll continue to try for the next 6 weeks.  And were there to be video or audiotape of John McCain unleashing the fury on anyone, it’d have a sum effect of zero on the electorate.

Let me tell you what the Left would say if they had the audio (which I believe is out there, waiting to be sprung through a Daily Kos or a Huffington Post that we haven’t yet seen – if you’re reading this, owner of said material, find my email address, I do wonders with sound).  The tack would be this:  He’s too old, he’s too cranky, the POW encampment left him mentally unstable, he’s abusive, he’s irresponsible, he can’t be trusted with his finger on the button, how dare he treat another person like that, how can we consider a person for the highest office in the land that would verbally berate someone like he does there!  It’s damn near emotional terrorism! Have I covered everything?

And the Right would herald it as a guy standing up for what he believes in.  Fighting for what he knows is right.  Exhibiting the kind of emotional freedom that we as Americans should all be able to relate to and want to have for ourselves in our own personal quiver of feeling-arrows.  (Where the hell did that come from?  Feeling-arrows?)  It’s another example of the kind of strong, unflinching leadership we need to see in our Presidents. And he’s right on.  You don’t see Barack Obama getting that kind of upset about anything, do you?  I wonder if he can even feel anything these days, after the kind of liberal indoctrination his brain has recieved.  He’s a communist robot – but we don’t believe he’s Muslim, though.

"Just wait - I'll have your head yet."

He’s a goddamn American hero, they’d say.  And who’s going to argue?  It reminds me of when one George W. Bush called an NYT reporter a “major-league asshole” just a few blocks from my house in Naperville one morning.  I was sleeping in.  I missed the most important thing to happen on Naperville North’s back yard, but I bet I had a hell of a night just hours before.  Remember that?  Everyone made two days worth of a deal out of that one little clip – and all it did was cement his image in peoples’ heads that had already made their minds up.  Either he was a jerk to you before, or he was a maverick straight-shooter before.  Calling a guy a major-league asshole just made you more sure of it.

So, I say, bring on the tapes.  Bring on the office audio from an open phone line, or a surveillance camera of McCain swearing at an ATM or a typewriter or a bad piece of fish.  I want to see him devolve into apoplexy at an offense, explode into paroxysms of profanity at having a vending machine break down in the halls of congress one late night, or bitch out a pizza delivery guy for not having the anchovy pie he ordered 35 minutes ago, goddamn you!  (I also wonder how many different euphemisms for “pissed off” I can come up with.)

I just want to see what’s going to go on behind the closed doors.  If and when he wins, we won’t be seeing the restrained, well-wrangled candidate who can’t even answer what he wants for dinner anymore without a consultant.  The shackles of the campaign trail will be off, he’ll be free to tell anyone on both sides of the congressional aisle to go fuck themselves, and if it comes to that, ah, what a magical moment it will be.

Hopefully, we get a little piece of that’s going to be by a month from now.  Will it be the fabled October Surprise from the Obama campaign?  If it surfaces, will we get OBL trotted out from Pakistan in response?  Will we invade Venezuela if we get full motion video?  Anything could happen.  Just please, universe, give me this one little thing.  Give me a videotape of John McCain going apeshit.