I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.

The NY Times has a brief history of John McSame up today.  What it shows us is a man who, like Bushie, was desperate to be separate from his father & grandfather, whose viewpoint on handling conflicts is aggression first, maybe questions later, and whose lust for power seems boundless.

I'm going to quote liberally since the article is four pages long and though it may seem like copyright infringement, it ain't really.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

After McSame returned from Vietnam and recovered physically from his long, untended injuries, he became a Navy Liason.

But Mr. McCain, the son and grandson of revered Navy admirals, was having second thoughts about following his family’s vocation. He had spent the previous four years as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, sampling life in the world’s most exclusive club as he escorted its members on trips around the globe — sitting with the sultan of Oman on the floor of his desert tent, or smuggling a senator’s private supply of Scotch through Saudi Arabian customs. snip

He knew he loved the exclusive club and ever the maverick relished in breaking the rules whenever possible.  But he was also harboring a lot of anger about Vietnam.  He felt the war should go on, with even more aggression, until all submitted to the will of the USA.  Yeah, he was pissed.

After five and a half years of listening to senators’ antiwar speeches over prison camp loudspeakers, Mr. McCain came home in 1973 contemptuous of America’s elected officials, convinced Congress had betrayed the country’s fighting men by hamstringing the war effort. But in the halls of the Senate, he discovered a new calling, at once high-minded and glamorous. snip

He was now ready to go after all those peaceniks (Carter, Dem Congresscritters & us) and was taken under the wing of John Tower, the infamous hard-drinking, womanizing dude from Texas.   What a couple they must've made together.

Mr. McCain relished the push-and-pull of legislative battles, eventually even plunging into defense budget fights with a personal agenda that was sometimes at odds with President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of the Navy. He built personal friendships and professional collaborations across ideological divides, a hallmark of his later Senate career. And he applauded the Senate’s leading hawks as they waged what they considered an epic struggle with the Carter administration over America’s place in the post-Vietnam world.

Under Mr. Tower’s tutelage, Mr. McCain turned his anger over the management of the Vietnam War into an all-or-nothing view of international conflict that became one of the few guiding principles in his otherwise unpredictable political career — from his opposition to sending Marine peacekeepers into Lebanon in 1983 to his current staunch support for the Iraq war. And when prominent conservative Christians later protested Mr. Tower’s nomination as defense secretary over accusations of drinking and womanizing, Mr. McCain’s furious counterattack opened the hostilities with that wing of his party that have persisted ever since. snip

Mr. McCain, for his part, was turning 40 and unsure of his path. A shoulder injury still limited his reach, complicating his prospects as a pilot. His marriage to Carol McCain, a former model who was nearly crippled in a car accident while he was imprisoned, was coming apart. He was engaged in a series of extramarital "dalliances," he later told his biographer, Robert Timberg. snip

Drinker, womanizer, and a really angry man with a lust for power.  I don't know about you, but this dude is looking scarier than King George.

But Mr. McCain, promoted to captain, threw himself into courting the lawmakers who shaped Navy policy. He formed especially close friendships with two relative liberals about his age: Senator William S. Cohen, a Maine Republican who represented a major shipbuilding state and later became defense secretary, and Senator Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat who had managed the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota in 1972. snip

Strange bedfellows indeed.

But the need to break from Daddy would take his life in a new direction.

"There was always this question, ‘Didn’t he want to be an admiral like his father and grandfather?’ ’ Mr. Hastings recalled. "He would say, ‘I don’t think that is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ "

Navy psychiatrists offered another explanation. Mr. McCain had long struggled to escape "the shadow of his father," Dr. P. F. O’Connell wrote in Mr. McCain’s Navy file after his return from Vietnam. But his hero’s homecoming had liberated him, bringing a "smile of fulfillment and relief" when he first heard Admiral McCain introduced as "Commander McCain’s father." Dr. O’Connell wrote: "He had arrived." snip

Yes, Bush & McCain = Brothers in arms

He won his House seat in 1982, a year after he left the Navy, and his Senate seat four years later. Mr. Tower retired in 1985, but their paths crossed again when the Texan was nominated to be secretary of defense by President George Bush. The influential Christian conservative organizer Paul M. Weyrich accused Mr. Tower of public drunkenness and philandering, imperiling his confirmation. A chorus of others echoed the charges.

Mr. McCain was stunned at the Senate’s outrage. "There were too many hearty drinkers around the place who might not always have been the most exemplary of devoted spouses to begrudge John his vices," he wrote in a chapter of his memoirs. "The sins Tower was accused of were hardly Washington novelties."

Leaping to his mentor’s defense, Mr. McCain denounced Mr. Weyrich as a holier-than-thou hypocrite, scrambled to discredit the charges and exploded in fits of rage at colleagues. At Mr. Tower’s defeat, Mr. McCain choked back tears.

"God bless you, John Tower," he said from the Senate floor. "You’re a damn fine sailor."

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Ya know what?  Loyalty like this is really admirable don't ya think?  In the face of facts, you stand by your man, your policy, your boozing friends, your aggressive stance against all who would oppose you and, and, and, look what you've got.

Please Goddess, spare our country from another four year of an even angrier, more aggressive, and more competitive soul than we have been subjected to for the last eight.