McCain's one-track mind
By Steve Benen Thursday Dec 27, 2007 7:15amApparently within striking distance in New Hampshire, and being touted in some circles as having an indirect route to the GOP nomination, John McCain has quickly become the center of Mitt Romney's attention. The two had an interesting exchange yesterday, with the former governor accusing the senator, fairly, of flip-flopping on taxes and immigration. McCain responded:
"I know something about tailspins, and it's pretty clear Mitt Romney is in one," said the former front-runner. "It's disappointing that he would launch desperate, flailing and false attacks in an attempt to maintain relevance."
The "tailspin" reference was, apparently, a reference to McCain's Vietnam service. It seems to be part of a pattern.
When McCain laments earmark spending, he emphasizes his Vietnam service. When he talks about military challenges in the 21st century, he emphasizes his Vietnam service. When he delivers a Christmas message, he emphasizes his Vietnam service.
It's a subtle theme, isn't it?
To be sure, by any reasonable measure, McCain's experience in the military during the war in Vietnam was heroic and demands respect. If he wants to use this part of his biography in the presidential campaign, it makes perfect sense -- like John Kerry, that's what war heroes do.
But let's not forget that, during the last presidential campaign, when Kerry reminded voters of his own heroic service, McCain criticized him for it.
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I read the McCain "tailspin" remark as him referencing his own tailspin in his '08 campaign -- as an early frontrunner who then fell further back in the pack -- not as a reference to his Vietnam service.
Time to get out the purple heart bandages
Remember the last Republican Convention? How they mocked John Kerry and other vets who had been wounded in battle by wearing bandaids with purple hearts on them, making fun of Democratic veterans who had received purple hearts because they didn't agree with their politics?
John McCain was there and never spoke out against them.
If he wants to emphasize his service now, maybe we should hand out bandaids at his events.
Or, sonce he was a POW, how about coupons for free waterboarding "swim" lessons?
Yeah.
Reporting for Doody!
Military Madman, selling peace through violence,have destroyed the promise of this once great country. During my short time on earth there has never been a day I remember when there hasn't been an enemy we need to destroy or bend to our best interests. And I especially like the idea that if we have to destroy all of mankind in order to win the final battle it will be worth the hollow victory that will follow.
Maybe McCain can use his Vietnam experience to talk about Iraq once in awhile.
You know. The quagmire we're currently in.
Veterans seem to do poorly in Presidential Elections:
Bush 41 looses to Clinton
Bob Dole looses to Clinton
Al Gore looses to Bush 43............technically the Supreme Court stopped Florida recount before the recount would have revealed Gore as the winner.
John Kerry loses to Bush 43...........again massive voter fraud occurs in Ohio. All relevant records are destroyed by Ohio Secretary of State.
Will McCain be swift boated by his party again?
Hard to say, but the Veteran status guarantees nothing for a candidate.
Military experience and religion are two subjects that IOKIYAR to talk about, unless you're Mike Huckleberry.
Case in point: Even McCain's Position on the ‘WOODSTOCK MUSEUM’: BUILD IT IN VIETNAM!
what did I learn from my military experience.......discipline, marching, taking orders, and oh yeah......how to kill other humans and try to stay alive.......
What did I learn from my military service? That you are thrown out for being gay.
But that was during peacetime. Now, as the recent episode of 60 Minutes showed, you can come forth with being gay in the military now and the military leaders and Republicans look the other way. The Republican view is that it is ok to fight and die for your country (and their oil wars) if you are gay and then try to throw you out in peacetime and deny you equal rights at home.
Vietnam is to McCain as 9/11 is to Giuliani.
Vietnam happened over 30 years ago. It's a good thing McCain didn't serve in WWII or WWI, or we'd be hearing about the Battle of the Bulge, or the struggles at Marne.
There are parallels between the Iraq War and Vietnam, but they reveal the stupidity of both wars, yet McCain's position is that more stupidity in Iraq is the solution. Perhaps he's never conceded that his becoming a prisoner was the result of horrific errors on the part of the US government.
In any event, continuing the Iraq fiasco will not bring back your lost years, McCain, so give it up. And do not subject more of our troops to the unnecessary traumas you endured, in another unnecessary war.
where are the swiftboaters attacking McCain for signing that letter the North VietNamese wanted him to sign...........yeah,yeah,I know he was tortured.......so were alot of other guys........and they didn't sign those letters.So...Where are the swiftboaters?
I thought he was shot down and spent most of his time in Nam in a prison cell. I know it doesn't take much to be called a hero down there, but, how does waiting out the war as a POW make anyone a hero?
the vietnam thing didnt work for kerry....now that was almost as bad a position as we are in now kerry vs. bush...mccain vs. clinton
were proper fooked either way
again
McCainBot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSk9toKfrwo
"bomb,bomb,bomb,bomb,bomb,Iran"........campaign over......bye,bye,now.
el kanuckistani @ 13:
He was the Son of Admiral McCain of the Joint Chiefs. When the Viet Cong found out who he was they wanted to release him, he refused to go and abandon his fellow prisoners, enduring a couple more years of hell on earth. Hero? Hell Yeah! As for politics, he sucks!
John McCain deserves respect for his military service.
He doesn't, however, deserve to be President.
EOKIYAAR!!
Ya wanna know what I learned from my military experience?
1. McCain was part of one of the worst at-sea disasters the US Navy ever experienced, the fire on the USS Forrestal, which was started, if I'm not mistaken, by McCain landing badly and triggering the events that led to millions in damage and loss of life and extensive injuries. McCain walked away unharmed.
2. After that, it was another mistake by McCain that led to his capture by the North Vietnamese. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a reputation as a Jonah, he certainly looked like either a jinx, or just one more rich and powerful man's son, given more than he could handle. By all means, let's put him in charge of everything.
3. Military intelligence, the oxymoron that drives much of our policy and war-mongering, is often regarded as a game by those in charge. Big boys playing war with big toys.
4. In 1981, I was present, (taking notes for the officer I worked for) at a secured meeting of officers where the discussion centered around how we are dependent on a constant flow of oil from the Middle East and how, since it was in our "vital interests" to keep the oil flowing, we were entitled to do anything to anybody, regardless of laws, treaties or national bounderies, to keep that oil coming.
That was right around the time Ronnie Reagan was telling us all to go out and buy gas hogs, no need to conserve or look for alternatives. Conservation is for sissies.
Nothing in the last 25 years has indicated a change in that belief system. And how many of our kids have now died because of it?
McCain was criticizing the swiftboaters and not John Kerry.
John McCain is the real deal. He survived the USS Forrestal and five years in the Hanoi Hilton while he could've been flying for the Texas Air National Guard.
For crying out loud, let's not be assholes and stoop to their level by degrading his service. We can still disagree with his positions.
Radically Moderate @ 17:
mcLame is a pussy who killed unseen people from the air. His daddy's status guaranteed his safety, so fuck his so-called courage! being 'braver' than boosh ain't no badge of honor and a uniform does NOT make mcLame any kind of hero. I'll bet he was NOT tortured since his daddy was a bigwig. mcLame is as full of shit as any child of privilege. AFAIAC, mcLame does NOT get a pass for his 'service', just like juliana gets no pass for 911.
roooth @ 20:
You are mistaken!
roooth @ 20:
Thank you.
tailspin is McCain's Tourette's word
Radically Moderate @ 17:
Or, from a Rovian point of view, he made a calculated decision that being released would tarnish his father's reputation and destroy his own political career, as the Swiftboat liars claimed Kerry "allowed" himself to get "nicked" by a bullet to bolster his political aspirations. It's human nature not to abandon your fellow prisoners, and I believe most people would follow the same course of action, despite the cost. To do otherwise is to admit you're a total piece of sh*t as a human being. Now, george w. bush, no doubt he would have been gone in a heartbeat and of course his disgusting family would have covered his tracks somehow, just as they did his record of being AWOL.
I think torture as a POW screwed up McCain's mind and he suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. Look at his disgusting groveling to bush these past years despite the whispering campaign that bush and Rove engineered against McCain and his family. If McCain couldn't fight a whispering campaign, how can he fight the terrorists? As Chris Matthews would say, "Ha!"
Don @ 23:
Don, I wish I was.......
I’m one of those who was shown the Forrestal fire as a training in damage contral and safety- all Navy recruits are: http://www.blah3.com/article.p…..2183950855
Apparently you can add the later fire on the Oriskany to the list of disasters McCain helped facilitate and walked away from: http://bushstole04.com/Editori…..mccain.htm
http://www.blah3.com/article.p…..2183950855
http://www.rense.com/general69/whwysu.htm
http://www.multied.com/navy/stories/forrestal.html
Patane Joseph M.
Service Dates=4/65 to 9/68
“I served aboard Forrestal at the time of the fire aboard ship while attached to fighter squadron eleven out of Oceana Va. It just so happend that I was working on the flight deck at the time of the fire onthe flight deck, if it wasn’t for this I believe in all honesty that I would have been killed with the 80 0r 90 some of my shipmates caught in their bunks asleep, I also believe that I wouldn’t be able to say I saw what started the fire to begin with, and that’s why I was put back on forrestal when she came home from PI ON her way back to Norfolk Va. McCain keeps blaming my squadron for this fire, when in all actuality, it was a fuel leak off his center line tank, and the ships power cords used to supply the electrial to turn up our craft, not VF-11 SHOOTION a missle acrost the flight deck as we we blamed for, and still are to this day,and if able I would tell Senator McCain what a lier he really is.”
If you haven’t served, its easy to blow off seemingly innocent mistakes by substandard and egotistical officers. However, if you spend time in war zones or isolated duty stations with them, you find out how a cavilier decision by an idiot with bars on his shoulder can leave a trail of dead bodies behind him as he ascends through the ranks.
Straight Shooter @ 26:
You said it!!! I could even forgive the military stuff, but allowing your wife and child to be maligned in the most disgusting and degrading manner - which for Republicans always involves racial slurs and sleazy sex - and then going back and GROVELING to the very people who did it to your wife and child just to get ahead politically is just repugnant.
McCain at the helm? No thanks!
Listen, lots of guys were tortured and killed by the Japanese during WWII....Lots of guys spent years in stalags under German command....lots of guys in Korea spent hellish years being tortured and brainwashed......I had an uncle shot down over Germany and spent 3 years in a German POW camp...not exactly a Marriott Hotel.....these guys were not heroes they were just unfortunate enough to be captured....the real heroes are the guys who died saving their buddies...the medics and corpsmen who died trying to save a life....we have since 9/11 diminished the word "Heroes" and give it to anyone....yes that also goes for the cops and firemen lost at the World Trade Center....they were doing their jobs....Heroes do extraordinary things, above and beyond the call of duty....McCain is not a hero, except in his own mind
I can't believe people think mccain is even going to rate in the polls.
the media are mad.
grumpyoldvet @ 28:
exactly!
Preacher Boob @ 11:
You beat me to it.
Rudy: 9/11, September eleven, 09.11.01 and so on.
Hammering a simple message into the heads of sheeple. Adolf was an expert at it.
I think you've overestimated the number of "tracks" in McCain's mind.
McCain basically said that John Kerry deserved to be Swift Boated because he had campaigned on his Vietnam experience. So if McCain should somehow how get the Repub nomination, get ready to man the Swift Boats and attack McCain for being a shitty air force pilot who easily got shot down, then gave away state secrets as he went insane in captivity. Fairs fair, right?
The beatings & torture the Vietcongs laid on McCain has finally made him NUTS. Who wants another crazy "kill them all" moron in our White House?
McCain criticized Kerry for it because the issue is not and was not whether you served, or whether you served bravely, or whether you sacrificed, but whether you supported and support both the Vietnam War and American military globalism.
And that is why conceding McCain's bravery is irrelevant.
It isn't his bravery per se that his voters value, or that he intends to allude to.
It's the continuing personal commitment to America's military and America's military globalism.
When will this old sick bastard retire from office and go into hiding? He should know that he will never become President of the United States, yet he continues to throw his stinky hat in the ring, hoping for a miracle.
If any of you think the use of the word 'tailspin' is a Vietnam reference, y'all is stoopid. I'm sure someone here can come up with a better criticism of McCain than that. Sheesh.
I'm not making excuses for the guy, but anybody who has seen action in a war it would be the galvanizing focal point in their lives, Kerry was able to work through this as McCain did and to me they're both heroes, and have probably seen things that could change a person at their core. I'm just saying it was an important time in their lives so they will use it for reference.
Actually, this is not what war heroes do - not all of them at least. One of the greatest war heroes to run for president never said a word about his service, let alone his medals. That hero was George McGovern, pilot, patriot, war hero. We need some more like that.
Steve Benen posted this same garbage on the web site Political Animal. I will comment here basically regarding what I posted over there. Benen states that "McCain's experience in the military during the war in Vietnam was heroic and demands respect." Benen then goes on to say that McCain is a war hero. Let us examine these assertions, shall we? When McCain flew his last mission in Vietnam, he was attempting to bomb a lightbulb factory which by any definition is a civilian target and NOT a military installation. After his plane crashed, McCain was pulled out of the water by angry Vietnamese villagers. He would have been beaten to death had not another Vietnamese villager taken pity upon McCain and protected him from the other villagers until he was taken to prison.
McCain's attempt to bomb that lightbulb factory was in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, which makes him, contrary to Benen's assertion, not a war hero but rather a war criminal. To this day, McCain has never expressed contrition for what he had attempted to do while in Vietnam. On the contrary, he wishes that the U.S. would have stayed in Vietnam until the U.S. could have somehow "won" in Vietnam. He is now apparently trying to make up for the U.S. finally leaving Vietnam by making sure that the U.S. remains in Iraq indefinitely. McCain, along with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others, deserve to be tried in The Hague for war crimes for what they have done to the Vietnamese and the Iraqi people.
Poor McCain, this is what he's up against.
*
They're like a bunch of sharks circling each other. Maybe they'll kill themselevs off before November '08. Huck seesm to have knocked 9iu11iani out of front running (for now); time to get out the rubber hoses Rudy!!!
I'm sure one-track minded McCain has many compatriots from back in the day with multi-tracked arms.
Folks seem to forget about Senator McCain as one of the 5 Senators involved in the Savings and Loan Scandal. He was obviously a good friend of Keating as he and family were flown to Keating's summer home for vacation several times.
He "smooth talked" his way out of that one.
Well that's intertesting... Just substitute Rudy's constant carping about 9/11 with 'Vietnam experience' and it's pretty much the same old tiredassed gameplan... This guy used to have some credibility once upon a time long ago.... I never much agreed with him but I respected him... Not so much anymore... He's old, his pitch is tired and he's sold out.... Maybe senility is starting to kick in... I don't know, but I can't help but kinda feel sorry for the guy he used to be....Not the guy he's become however..JD
grumpyoldvet
....we have since 9/11 diminished the word “Heroes” and give it to anyone….yes that also goes for the cops and
firemen lost at the World Trade Center….they were doing their jobs….Heroes do extraordinary things, above and
beyond the call of duty....
If a soldier dies trying to save his buddies, isn't that part of "doing the job"?
The firemen and the policemen who lost their lives on 9/11 are not heroes?
Weren't they trying to save lives also?
Consider the magnitude of the situation. I'm pretty sure none of them ever faced an emergency on a scale like this before. Two towering skyscrapers on fire. Thousands of people still inside. Chaos and mayhem that doesn't necessarily occur during the common, everyday house fire.
Remember, that both buildings were being completely evacuated. Why? Because of the fear that they would collapse, and yet these men and women ventured in, racing up the stairways to save as many people as they could. Many of them knowing in the back of their minds that if the towers did go, they would most certainly die, and yet they still went in.
Wouldn't you say that this is the very definition of going beyond the call of duty?
McCain's one track keeps going around, and around, and around, at a steady 78 RPM.
It speeds up a little right after he winds the Victrola, you can tell because his voice gets higher.
You can deride McCain all you want but no one who has ever run for President has seen the horrors he's seen. The tailspin remark can be taken politically - until the last month, his campaign was all but given up for dead - or simply because the man is a veteran of the Air Force.
I disagree with McCain on many things but let's remember who the target is. Like every other GOP candidate, Romney is a man who derides McCain's stance on torture, even while sharing a stage with a man who endured years of it.
In the late 1960s, Romney not only received a draft waiver but he did so IN ORDER TO BE A MISSIONARY FOR HIS CHURCH IN BORDEAUX, FRANCE!!! Despite his enthusiastic support for the military, when the country was at war, Romney - a man who takes nearly as much pride in his physical prowess as Bush 43 - put his church before his country. It never dawned on him that maybe he could do both.
We need to get beyond all this partisan hatred. Otherwise, we will have Hillary Clinton as our nominee - a woman who's long lusted after the Mantel of Executive Privilege - running opposite Huckabee (who denies evolution) or Giuliani - if he doesn't implode, a man who would make Bush 43 look good.
Be careful what you ask for, you very well may get it.
Radically Moderate @ 17:
"Reverse-Ace" McCain managed to crash four aircraft--before his shootdown in `Nam--making that FIVE US aircraft downed. Quite a feat! He doesn't look too good when one investigates the USS Forrestal flight deck fire cause by some horsing around (that he was in the thick of) that got people killed while his own son-of-an-Admiral ass got hustled off to greener pastures.
Does the phrase "Keating Five" bring up any memories?
Wasn't he married to his 1st wife when he hooked up with his current "trophy" wife whose rich Daddy bankrolled his early political career?
But, hey, "the surge" is working, right? And McCain "stands for his principles" (whatever those are). What a sockpuppet . . . .
JR @ 49:
The Air Force brass must be scratching their heads on how a former Navy pilot can become "a veteran of the Air Force". Now Ron Paul . . . there's your Air Force vet.
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