Bad-Ass

If When elected, can John McCain break into the Top 5 Most Badass Presidents? Maybe.

I'm pretty sure John will have the highest personal body count of all presidents; JSM3 flew 22 attack missions over North Vietnam before he was shot down on his 23rd. Although he'd complain about the value of those targets, he must have fried a lot more NVAs than Andrew Jackson scored dueling victories. I say "personal body count" because officers usually don't do the dirty work of killing in war; they usually just wave the sword and give the orders. Attack pilots actually push the button that releases the bombs or fires the missiles.

John McCain will succeed Bush41 and Bush43 as POTUS former pilots of combat aircraft, a bad-ass occupation in itself. Let's tally the bad-assitude:

GHWB: Naval aviator (operating from a carrier automatically doubles bad-ass points), flew 55 combat missions (Avenger torpedo/ bomber), survived one water landing, was shot down and rescued by submarine (becoming a de facto submariner for a month).

GWB: Air National Guard pilot, flew the Convair F-102 (an interceptor not in great demand for use in Vietnam)

JSM3: Naval aviator, flew the A-1 Skyraider and A-4 Skyhawk, before Vietnam survived two crashes and a collision with power lines, survived a horrific accident/fire on the deck of USS Forestal, flew 22 combat missions over North Vietnam, was shot down by an SA-2 missile, suffered crippling injuries, endured torture, mistreatment, and isolation in five years of captivity.

You don't get to be bad-ass by being lucky, GWB (but we still luv ya), you get it by being unlucky and then triumphing over circumstances. Teddy Roosevelt's story wouldn't have been so astounding if he was born a strapping vision of the man he would become; he was born a sickly asthmatic who "beat asthma to death, he ate asthma's raw flesh and ran 100 straight miles off the energy it gave him."

I have no idea what Bush41's personal body count was, but the Avenger's payload was up to 2000 lbs against the Skyhawk's 9900 lbs maximum, so the A-4 could drop almost twice the ordnance in 22 missions than a TBF could in 55 sorties. So he must have killed a lot more people than Ted Kennedy's Oldsmobile did. And he spent more time in a Vietnamese POW camp than Barack Hussein Obama Jr. has served in the US Senate.

Sure, Johnny Mac didn't kill all those Vietnamese with his bare hands, but rumor has it that the real reason Chuck Norris supported Governor Huck is that Norris is personally afraid of John S. McCain III.