John McCain: “I Hate the Gooks, French, Californians…”
NO Brain
A RafaelMartel.com special operative sent us this amusing little article from the San Francisco Chronicle circa 2000, back when McCain was not merely an escaped inmate of “Sunrise Senior Living” who had somehow hilariously found himself spearheading a major presidential campaign. Sometime in the last millennium, McCain had developed a reputation as a charming “maverick” “straight-talker” who was too liberal for the rising crop of George W. Bush neo-cons and just right for the sea of undecided voters that the people working the Gallup polls decided to emphasize that year (notice how rare the term is today). Many that attack McCain today do so with the disclaimer that he wasn’t always a hateful warmonger who put the well-being of his lobbyist cronies first, yet in this report from the 2000 primaries, McCain was openly comfortable with racial slurs and his hatred of niche ethnic and national groups. He repeated several times to a Chronicle reporter: “I hate the gooks… I will hate them as long as I live.”
“Gook” is a racially derogatory term for East and Southeast Asians that works as a counterpart of Africans’ “nigger” and Latin Americans’ “spick”. It is considered equally offensive in relation to the latter two, but has declined in usage since the Vietnam and Korean Wars, when anti-Asian sentiments reached a fever pitch.
McCain did not hesitate to add to the list the French and the Californians, but he only hated the French because doing so won him Republican votes, and the Californians kept stepping on his Arizona lawn, or something. Somewhere mid-interview, when McCain realized that he was an old angry racist, he tried to justify the use of the term by claiming it only referred to Asian soldiers, which somehow made everything better.
But, hey, the good news is that, considering John McCain’s state in 2008, he probably doesn’t remember who the “gooks” are, thus making him not racist!
