McCain reacts badly to claims that he's campaigning on his POW status.
Oh, this is hysterical. McCain's getting himself all in a tizzy over remarks by Jim Webb that he should stop playing up his military service and that he should keep the military out of politics.
McCain has responded by claiming that the whole thing is a co-ordinated Obama attack.
It's clear that Webb's comments have thrown McCain's campaign into confusion as his military record is the only thing that John McCain is campaigning on.Now the McCain campaign is responding to Webb, arguing that Webb's comments prove that Obama "can't control his surrogate operation." McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers sends us this:
If you didn't think this was a coordinated attack on John McCain's credentials before, it's clear now that it is. Barack Obama's surrogates are telling the McCain campaign to "calm down" about attacks on his military record? Seriously? Now somehow Wes Clark's attacks are John McCain's fault? It's absurd. If Barack Obama can't control his own surrogate operation, how can he be trusted to run the country?
The press and he pretend that he's modest about this and that he rarely brings the subject up, but the truth is that he mentions the fact he was a prisoner of war as often as Giuliani mentioned 9-11.
John McCain, and certain members of the right wing press, believe that the fact that McCain was a war hero means he should walk into the White House, which is why they get so incensed when retired general Wesley Clark points out that being a prisoner of war does not prepare one for the White House.
I mean, the McCain argument is simply nonsense on it's face. Let's reverse it. What qualities are the captives in Guantanamo Bay learning that would prepare them to become President of Afghanistan?
Other than a deep and abiding hatred of the people that captured them I can't think of a single quality that their time there would have fostered which would prepare them for the task of running a government, can you?
And yet McCain's entire campaign is built around the fact that he was once a prisoner of war as if it follows that this makes him, somehow, presidential material.
That's why the McCain camp are going apeshit over Clarke and Webb's comments. Because they are underlining the basic fault in McCain's entire strategy. His arguments concerning his POW status appeal to one's emotions, but when intellect is applied, his entire campaign falls apart.
It takes no special skill to be captured, and enduring capture as a POW does not prepare one to become Commander in Chief.
And it is in no way undermining McCain's military record to point this out. Guantanamo Bay is not a place where future Afghan presidents are made, and neither was the Hanoi Hilton.
This argument annoys the McCain camp so vehemently because, beneath all the false modesty of "I don't like to discuss my time as a POW", McCain actually does very little else.
His POW status IS his campaign.
UPDATE:
Typical of the right wing nonsense spewed about all this is Kathryn Jean Lopez's horror over at the National Review that Clarke could dare to say this:
I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark told Face the Nation on Sunday.But that's really not that different from this remark:
"It doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down."The only difference is that the latter comment was made by John McCain.
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2 comments:
I got one for you: google "reverse ace."
Oh Bhc,
That's simply too good. I've heard another story of him setting off some missile on board a ship. By all accounts he wasn't the most talented man ever to put on a uniform. He came 894th in the Naval Academy out of a class of 899.
And I've also read somewhere that he actually had less than twenty hours combat duty in Vietnam. It's no wonder that, unlike Kerry, McCain is choosing not to release his military records.
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