McCain's Nasty Campaign and POW Status

Obama's statement yesterday refusing to comment on Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy shows the distance still remaining between his campaign and McCain's. McCain's negative attack ads dragged Obama down somewhat, but he is still far above McCain in the decency of his campaign.

The Economist this week talks about McCain's bio in an article entitled "No Surrender." It says, "After failing to dodge [a surface-to-air missile], he ejected from his plane, broke three limbs and fell into a lake. He was dragged out by a mob, stabbed in the groin and beaten nearly to death." It does not comment on the the major decisions in that sequence: to have ejected from the plane, not to have fought to the death despite his injuries, or not to have committed suicide before the mob captured him. It is arguable that the honorable thing for McCain to have done, especially in light of the fact that his father was the senior Navy commander in his theater, would have been to go down with his plane. Allowing himself to be captured placed his father in a terrible position. His father dealt with it, perhaps appearing callous, but perhaps he felt that his son had failed to live up to the family's naval tradition. McCain had a horrible career at Annapolis; then unlike the majority of his cohorts, he got shot down, and when he got shot down, he allowed himself to become a POW. It's not a sin to become a POW, but it's not heroic either. It became more heroic for Vietnam war POWs because it was one of the few things that the country embraced, probably because they were freed only when the war was over, and thus there was no need to use them to oppose the war. The regular veterans came home to contempt from their civilian counterparts, who saw them as tools used by the government to pursue a war that civil society opposed, and therefore as war criminals regardless of whatever courage and decency they may have displayed in combat.

Ironically, Vietnam POWs probably got treated more like heroes than POWs from previous wars, while ordinary veterans got treated worse. McCain came to believe the hype surrounded his return, deserved or not, and now is basing his presidential campaign on it.

I'm guessing he failed to live up to the standards of his four-star admiral father and grandfather, and in response tends to downplay their service. It order to portray Obama as an elitist, he tends to portray his four-star father as something only a little better than a bag-boy at Safeway. In reality, McCain was a failure by his father's standards.

Fortunately, Obama is too polite to say anything like this.

Putin Says Bush Pushed Georgia To Attack for McCain

Putin obliquely accused Bush of encouraging or helping Georgia attack South Ossetia in order to help John McCain get elected, according to a CNN interview reported in the NYT. I was already worried in an earlier blog that McCain had helped foment the war in Georgia.

Putin seemed to imply that an American military or CIA officer was directly involved. I doubt this. If a CIA officer was involved, it was probably some rogue agent like those who worked in the Watergate break-in, not one working in a CIA operation. I think there is no love lost between the CIA and Bush. Bush has made the CIA's failures the scapegoat for his failure on 9/11, and by reorganizing the intelligence community has weakened the CIA significantly. It's unlikely that the career leadership of the CIA would undertake an operation mainly to support McCain's candidacy. It's also unlikely that SecDef Gates would risk starting a war for partisan politics, although I'm not so sure about some of the wild men in the special forces command; I just don't know enough about them.

Although I'm dubious that the US government would have encouraged Georgia to start a war to help McCain, I think the USG probably encouraged Georgia to tweak Russia's nose for its own foreign policy reasons, however stupid they may be. And I think that McCain used is own foreign policy contacts to encourage Georgia to be aggressive, particularly his chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Schuenemann, who is a lobbyist for Georgia. He basically gets paid to foment a war that advances McCain's campaign. McCain's connections are obvious; he and Saakashvili claim to talk several times a day, with Schuenemann's lobbying firm picking up a little commission every time they do. Plus, McCain has sent his own envoys to buck up Georgia's aggressiveness -- Sen. Graham, Sen. Lieberman, and his wife, Cindy McCain. No doubt they all said something like, "Don't give up," but the questions is how far they went in promising military aid either now or after "President McCain" is elected.

McCain Hides Behind POW Experience

I've had it with McCain's touting of his POW experience as the answer to every question, particularly to how many houses he has. Jay Leno was the final chapter for me, when McCain said he wasn't concerned about how many houses he had because he didn't have a house while he was a POW. Maybe not, but he had a wife, and he dumped her for Cindy not long after he got back. Cindy was the Paris Hilton of her day, an heiress with a hot body. McCain latched on to her pretty fast, before he got around to divorcing his first wife.

But what about being a POW? It's honorable, but several levels below the highest sacrifice for one's country. Obviously the greatest sacrifice is to die for your country. Why doesn't McCain talk about the pilots who died when they were shot down over North Vietnam? Maybe because that makes him look bad. Then there are those who don't surrender. They don't end up as POWs. They probably end up dead, too. Finally there are the POWs who try to escape. Maybe it was impossible from McCain's prison, but it should have been an objective. Being a POW is not an option for most Army soldiers and Marines who are face to face with the enemy, as opposed to flying miles above it. For most of them surrender is not an option. What about Gen. McAuliffe's reply to the German demand for surrender at Bastogne during World War II? "Nuts." Becoming a POW was not an option. While many Army Air Corps troops became POWs during WW II, many also escaped and worked with the resistance in France and other occupied countries.

McCain's father and grandfather were four-star admirals. By their standards, McCain's Navy career was a failure. He became a senator after he took over Cindy's money, but he couldn't cut it in the Navy. Maybe he sees becoming commander-in-chief as a way to redeem himself in the eyes of his father and grandfather.

McCain might be the first president to have surrendered in combat.

Is McCain Just Another Worthless Vietnam Veteran?

This article by a fellow POW of McCain's on why he will not vote for McCain gives me conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it's good to know that you don't have to fall down and worship McCain because he was a POW. On the other, it's disappointing that no one seems to have come out of Vietnam with a good reputation. The war tends to destroy those who served in it whether they were a "hero" like McCain or a poor grunt just trying to survive long enough to get back home. At least part of this is because the American elite did not serve and in order to make themselves feel better about avoiding service, they belittle the service of those who went to Vietnam.

As a Vietnam veteran, I am disappointed at veterans denigrating other veterans, whether it's "Swift Boat Veterans" running down John Kerry, or another POW running down McCain. When I came back, all any civilian wanted to hear was whether you killed any babies or committed some other atrocity in Vietnam. One book I remember reading was called "No Victory Parades." One problem for John McCain is that he missed all that. He came back praised as a hero rather than reviled as a criminal for his service. His tour of duty was a lot tougher than most, but his reception was a lot better than most. That may be one reason he is so ready to go to war, whether against Iraq, Iran or Russia. I liked him in 2000, but that was before he became such a warmonger. I think his defeat by Bush changed him for the worse. This article at least raises questions about how much people should bow down to McCain's POW experience. He uses it for everything, most recently defending himself for not knowing how many houses he has. His spokesman said something like, "He lived in only one house for five and half years, in prison" Maybe he should cool it on the POW stuff for a while.