McCain Picks Tailhook Sexual Harassment Scandal Vet To Oversee Transition

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/10/10403_mccain_lehman_transition_tailhook.html

On October 29, 1991, Senator John McCain went to the floor of the US Senate. The former Navy pilot was angry and disgusted. In recent days, the news had broken that the previous month Navy airmen and others had gone wild—engaging in sexual molestation, out-of-control drinking, and other misconduct—at the Tailhook Association convention in Las Vegas, an annual gathering of retired and active-duty naval aviators. “I cannot tell you,” McCain proclaimed, “the distaste and displeasure that I have as a naval aviator…concerning this incident.” He bemoaned the fact that senior ranking naval officers and civilian leaders had been at the meeting. He called for an investigation and urged the Navy to suspend its traditional participation with the Tailhook reunions. “There is no time in the history of this country that something like this is more inappropriate,” McCain said, “and we cannot allow it. It is unconscionable. And we in the military...should be ashamed and embarrassed...that this kind of activity went on. And there is no excuse for it.”

Now, McCain has placed one of the men responsible for permitting—and encouraging-- loutish activity at the Tailhook meetings in a powerful position: heading up his transition team.

snip

Most of the officers in the room, including the man on his back, were hard-drinking renegades. Some had been partying for days, others for hours. The carpet was spongy and damp from alcohol spilled on it by drunken military men. The room itself reeked with the odor of booze and sweat. But nobody seemed to care much. All eyes were on the man and the naked woman standing over him, wagging her bare rump in a teasing motion. The men in the room went into a throaty uproar at the site, and their cheers and laughs grew louder as the show went on.

The man on the floor was Lehman. And this was the example he was setting at this particular Tailhook convention. Another account of the Tailhook scandal--The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal by William McMichael--noted that Lehman ate whipped cream out of the stripper’s crotch.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/10/10403_mccain_lehman_transition_tailhook.html

[Solly Mack]

1. Ah...values

snort