You know what? Can we stop with this bullshit meme about having respect for McCain’s service?
He barely graduated from the Naval Academy. He crashed a plane on a training flight. Then he crashed another. Then he almost crashed a third and caused a fairly significant blackout in Spain by flying into a bunch of powerlines. By many accounts he never showed the slightest aptitude for flying, nor a desire to really improve, nor a deep desire to serve his country. Mostly, according to what I’ve read, he wanted to be a hotshot but didn’t want to do the actual work to get good.
Then he got shot down. A big part of a pilot’s responsibilities on a combat mission is avoiding exactly that. He was shot down, captured, and told his captors that his daddy was a Very Important Person.
What’s heroic about that? Seriously, he had an extremely cushy assignment in the military, he fucked up repeatedly, eventually there were consequences, and, just like hundreds of other soldiers, he managed not to die.
Do I have a certain degree of respect that he physically survived? Yes. Do I think that his actions demonstrated any sort of heroism? No, not at all. Do I think it’s an insult to soldiers who truly have done heroic deeds, who truly have gone above and beyond the call of duty, to refer to McCain’s actions as heroic? Yes, absolutely. McCain at most was average.
Also, I seriously recommend that everyone read this article. It’s fairly long, but extremely well-written and rather revealing about McCain’s history.
When it comes time for the President of The United States to sit in a cage and be tortured for months on end, who would you want to be in charge-the untested Obama, or the tested and ready McCain?
Agreed; whereas they might well see McCain as a continuation of the crap we’ve had for the past eight years; I know I would.
(Is McCain still pushing that stuff about how “the surge worked”? Kind of brilliant, really; you avoid having to address the fact that the whole policy is terrible by concentrating on the one part of it that seems to have not been a disaster.)
McCain was actively involved in re-opening relations with Vietnam, and not in order to take revenge. Just FYI. I’m voting for Obama, but I don’t see that it’s necessary to always assume the worst about McCain.
I kind of like the idea that for the first time we’ll have a President who can tell a hostile foreign leader to “kiss my black ass, mofo”. Okay, that won’t happen, but it’s a nice image.
Hostile Dialect, **Sitnam **wasn’t making a racist joke, he was referencing the Futurama Episode where the Globetrotters (from the Globetrotter homeworld) challenged Earth to a basketball match. Thats where my remark about McCains ***Atomic supermen ***came from.
I guess you’d have to have seen the episode to get the joke. It was pretty funny in that context.