Et Tu, McCain?

Republican operative Charles Black is organizing a Swiftboat-style attack on Barack Obama for the general election campaign. While normally this involves creating distance and deniability for the candidate behind these attacks, Senator John McCain could not help himself last Sunday on ABC News when interviewed by George Stephanopoulos. It seems the McCain approach will build on Hillary Clinton's anti-Obama mantra perverting of his "bitterness" remarks, not wearing American flag lapel pins, his tenuous links to the self-promoting ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers and the Revs. Wright and Farrakhan, and the Rezco affair. The GOP will attack Obama by impugning his patriotism while wrapping its candidate in the flag. "He's black and he's a closet Muslim" will no doubt be kept for private one-to-one conversations but expect it to be there as well.

It's fair, therefore, to imagine what an anti-McCain campaign launched by independent groups supporting Obama will look like if left unfettered by mainstream Democratic operatives afraid to give offense to groups of voters, the same weak kneed folks who brought down Dukakis, Gore and Kerry by not answering in kind to being attacked by The Right.

John McCain enthusiastically and without a hint of doubt as to the War's legality strapped himself into a Navy fighter-bomber and headed towards North Vietnam every day. He bombed villages indiscriminately during an undeclared, illegal war in which his father, one Admiral McCain, and the US Navy played a major role. The Tonkin Gulf incident, fabricated by the US Navy, led President Lyndon Johnson to launch air attacks on North Vietnam and thus irretrievably commit the US to what became the longest war in US history. A Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery (most likely led by one of the 95% of Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners who were women) shot down McCain's Navy jet and he was taken prisoner.

McCain's "heroism" stems uniquely from the fact that he was an obstreperous prisoner of war unwilling to cooperate with his captors. Undeniably thugs, McCain's jailers resembled the jailers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in their sadism and lack of respect for international conventions guaranteeing rights to enemy combatants. That he refused an early release and was not "broken" by his captors does not make him George Washington, Sergeant York or even Audie Murphy.

McCain's earlier and post-War years were ones of privilege, stature and mischief. He was by his own and all other accounts a cocky, drunken, gambling, whore mongering flyboy whose positions before and after the Vietnam War were arranged for by his family connections. His years as Naval Liaison to the US Senate allowed him to charm and ingratiate himself in the corridors of power which led to a vacant House seat being arranged for him in Arizona, where he had never visited let alone lived.

His family's DNA is war. The McCain family history of grandfather, father, McCain himself and now his son being at war is essential to understanding his psyche.

He is Sparta and the rest of us are Athens.

A President McCain could well lead to the end of The American Century.

Richard M. Walden is a Los Angeles-based civil rights lawyer who served on active duty in the US Army in 1968-1969.

Comments

[shubes61]

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/reprehensible_misrepresentation.html

i'm sending this around to everyone i know... this lies will NOT go unchallenged!

[mindact]

that's kinda weak... we ought to use cindy mccain's drug problems, john mccain's cozying to special interests, he's secret love child (aka the adopted black daughter), he's calling his wife a cunt, he's wanting to be a democrat after loosing to dubya (that will hit the conservatives hard and their support will decimate), a tape of him calling the conservatives agents of intolorance, then turn around and show him embrace hagee calling the catholic church the great whore... he's bomb..bomb bomb iran and 100 years in iraq statements... he's statements about the americans being better off and the economic problems being more physcological instead of real... I mean most of these stuff are on video tape. By the time we're done with McCain, the republicans won't want to touch him with a twelve inch pole. We sure know how to swiftboat. The key issue is stick to a theme or two every two weeks, by the time he's recovering from each attack, we're sending out the next two....

[jaynevada]

Twelve inch pole???!!!!!

The phrase is "won't touch with a twelve foot pole".

[milo9]

You are correct sir, I will be one of those you're talking about. Like how many times can he sell his Hero Card?

I respectfully suggest that everyone who gives a fuck use whatever communication and artistic skills they possess to offset McCains advantage with Corporate Media. He cannot be allowed to win. It's do or die.

President McCain would be America's third strike.

[Anuphobe]

Spending five plus years as a prisoner of war does not necessarily prepare you to be President, although McCain would have you believe it. It might come in handy if he is ever taken prisoner again, however. His being shot down also might indicate a lack of expertise, rather than heroism. I tend not to take flyboys seriously, because they serve in an antiseptic war, high above the battles where people are shot and killed or maimed, their primary interest in whether the target was hit. McCain's story that he hid out in the jungle for several days before finally being caught also does not agree with the memory of a Vietnamese boy who says Mc Cain was the first American he'd ever seen; the occasion being when he was shot down, parachuted into a lake with two broken arms and had to be pulled out so that he wouldn't drown. The story appeared recently in The Nation: author Tom Hayden. So, if you take away McCain's heroism, you're pretty much left with an angry old man whose trophy wife bakes him cookies from a plagarized recipe.