Norquist and McCain - The Feud ContinuesSen. John McCain (R-AZ) used his report to clobber Grover Norquist, and Norquist rebutted by calling McCain a “liar” and “delusional.”
Oh, but this wasn’t the first time. This is namecalling with a history — dating at least back to the 2000 election, when Norquist mounted an ugly effort to defeat McCain.
McCain suddenly found himself with the upper hand in 2004, so the story goes, when the Abramoff investigation landed in his lap at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where he was chair. He had all sorts of damning emails at his disposal.
Back in March, Ryan Lizza wrote in The New Republic where things went from there…
McCain subpoenaed volumes of e-mails and donor records from ATR. In the midst of the fight, the two sides elevated the hostility to new heights. Norquist referred to McCain as “the nut-job from Arizona.” Asked about the comment, he told a reporter he actually meant to say the more subtle “gun-grabbing, tax-increasing Bolshevik.” McCain’s chief of staff, Mark Salter, returned fire, calling Norquist a bore and a blowhard and noting that “most Reagan revolutionaries came to Washington to do something more patriotic than rip off Indian tribes.” In a 2005 New Yorker article, the two sides traded their most personal barbs yet, with Norquist hinting that McCain is crazy (“completely unstable,” he charged) and with the McCainiacs hinting back that Norquist is gay (“Grover couldn’t be any closer to Abramoff if they moved to Massachusetts and got married,” said Salter).
The fight even spilled into the streets. In a radio interview, Norquist sputtered that McCain’s entire investigation was actually an elaborate plot to help McCain’s favored influence-peddlers score Abramoff’s ex-clients. Scott Reed, a die-hard McCainiac lobbyist who had indeed picked up some of Abramoff’s Indian business, went ballistic. Spying Norquist in front of his building, he told him to go fuck himself.