HondoLaneNJ: Snipped for brevity...
McPain? He wasn't smacked down by the republicans! He was smacked down by Kerry and his cronies!
No Hondo I was talking about when McPain ran against Bush for the Rep candidate for president.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_presidential_campaign,_2000John McCain, the United States Senator from Arizona, launched his first candidacy for the presidency of the United States in the 2000 presidential election.
"Announcing his run for the Republican Party nomination in September 1999, McCain was the main challenger to Texas Governor George W. Bush, who had the political and financial support of most of the party establishment. McCain staged an upset win in the February 2000 New Hampshire primary, capitalizing on a message of political reform and "straight talk" that appealed to moderate Republican and independent voters and to the press. McCain's momentum was halted when Bush won the South Carolina primary later that month, in a contest that became famous for its bitter nature and an underground smear campaign run against McCain....
The battle between Bush and McCain for South Carolina has entered American political lore as one of the nastiest, dirtiest, and most brutal ever. On the one hand, Bush switched his label for himself from "compassionate conservative" to "reformer with results", as part of trying to co-opt McCain's popular message of reform. On the other hand, a variety of business and interest groups that McCain had challenged in the past now pounded him with negative ads.
The day that a new poll showed McCain five points ahead in the state, Bush allied himself on stage with a marginal and controversial veterans activist named J. Thomas Burch, who accused McCain of having "abandoned the veterans" on POW/MIA and Agent Orange issues: "He came home from Vietnam and forgot us." Incensed, McCain ran ads accusing Bush of lying and comparing the governor to Bill Clinton, which Bush complained was "about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary." An unidentified party began a semi-underground smear campaign against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, audience plants, and the like. These claimed most famously that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter Bridget was adopted from Bangladesh; this misrepresentation was thought to be an especially effective slur in a Deep South state where race was still central), but also that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. The Bush campaign strongly denied any involvement with these attacks; Bush said he would fire anyone who ran defamatory push polls.
During a break in a debate, Bush put his hand on McCain's arm and reiterated that he had no involvement in the attacks; McCain replied, "Don't give me that shit. And take your hands off me."