Here, you can watch McCain fail to remember a question two seconds after it was asked, and in the process of bumbling over an answer to that question when it was reasked, claim that he fought "for the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday in [his] state..." This is a borderline misrepresentation, so I'll present the facts and let you decide. McCain, in fact, voted against making MLK's birthday a federal holiday (and thus a holiday in his state) in 1983. Watch here:
Of course, stories like this always a little more complicated than they seem. So here's McCain saying he didn't know anything about who Dr. Martin Luther King was when he voted (at the age of 47) against making his birthday a federal holiday in 1983 (a fact which reinforces my claim that he is a mental midget):
What McCain wants to do here is claim that he wasn't always an ignorant buffoon. He finally learned a little about the history of the civil rights movement, you see. And after getting edumacated, he put up his "fight" to have MLK day recognized as a holiday.
After voting in 1983, allegedly out of massive ignorance, with 90 losing members of the House of Representatives (against 338 others), McCain "fought" to have MLK day recognized as a holiday in his home state only (presumably by expressing that he was in favor of having it recognized). He didn't vote for it, of course, since he didn't have any say in such matters. And he didn't fight hard enough to get the Arizona legislature to recognize it. Instead, a governor instituted the holiday by executive order. (If there was already a federal holiday, you may be wondering why this was necessary. As it turns out, many states were not recognizing the federal holiday.)
But four years later, the holiday was repealed by the newly elected (and divinely inspired) Governor Evan Mecham. What did McCain have to say about it? According to Sam Stein:
McCain said he thought Mecham was correct in his decision. [link]
So in 1983, McCain was against making MLK's birthday a holiday in his state. And then in 1987, McCain said that Mecham did the right think by taking MLK's birthday off the Arizona books as a holiday. In 1989, McCain was back in favor of a state holiday in Arizona (he did get a former president to appeal to Arizonans to acknowledge a holiday), but he was still opposed to the existing federal holiday. So if McCain did "fight" for a state holiday, he has also "fought" against it (at the time he claims he was "fighting" for it). And furthermore, he fought against the federal version of the holiday quite extensively.
You decide if this counts as a lie. In any case, it's nice to know that McCain votes with the minority on issues he professes to be utterly clueless about.
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