No Runny Eggs

Revisions/extensions (5:19 pm 4/8/2008) – I apologize to the Fox News gang for the auto-pingback on an AoSHQ-worthy rant.

(H/T – among others, Ace, whom I’m using because this is not going to be profanity-free, and because Slublog fed Ace a classic Slu-Shop)

West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller (D for dumbfuck DhimmiRAT) really stepped on his crank earlier today when he uttered the following horseshit:

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Shall we play, “How Many Ways Is the Jackass Wrong?” For $50, when were laser-guided munitions introduced to the Southeast Asia area of operations? 1972, which was, give or take a few months, 5 years after McCain was shot down.

Let’s go for double-Jeopardy, where the scores can really change. Has any of the US Navy versions of the A-4 ever been provisioned to carry laser-guided weapons? BZZZZT!!! The only precision-guided weapons the early-Vietnam era of the Skyhawk carried were the AGM-12 Bullpup command-guided missile (for those in Rio Linda, the pilot had to hand-fly the missile over its 10-nm range) and the AGM-62 Walleye EO-guided bomb (entered service in 1967, range of 15 miles, and was a fire-and-forget weapon). Later A-4s did carry the AGM-65 Maverick EO-guided missile as well as the Walleye II, and, after the Navy retired the A-4 in 1975, some versions did gain the ability to use laser-guided munitions, but those came about after McCain was shot down.

As for not seeing them hit, McCain typically carried plain iron bombs at low level, which meant he saw them hit and what they hit. Indeed, that was the mission profile on the mission he was shot down.

Oh, and CDR Salamander corrects the idiotic claim the A-4 is a “fighter plane”; the “A” stands for “Attack”. Yes, the Marines and other countries later slapped a couple of Sidewinders on the A-4, and TOPGUN (and “Top Gun”) used them as the analog to MiGs in Dissimilar Air Combat Training, but the Navy didn’t slap the Sidewinders on them.

Yes, there is late news that Rockefeller did apologize for being abso-fucking-lutely wrong. I can’t speak for McCain, but the phrase, “too little, too late” comes to mind.