while talking about McCain, because most of us felt that he (McCain) had tainted his honor somewhat over the past eight years in an attempt to get sufficient Republican support to win the 2008 nomination for president. (If you read the entire thread, you’ll also see that magellan01 has no problem whatsoever in dismissing John Kerry’s service as entirely self-serving and unworthy of any respect whatsoever.)
No one in the thread questioned the honor or valor shown by McCain as a POW, or that for many years in the Senate he had appeared to be an honest man who supported positions he believed in without rigidly toeing the party line (I say appeared simply because no one can know what goes on in the heart and mind of another person.) even though we often disagreed with his positions. But most of us felt that this had changed fairly radically over the past several years, and that John McCain could no longer lay claim to the integrity he had so proudly (and probably justly) boasted. We felt that his essential character had in fact changed.
magellan01 claimed to be disappointed and a little disgusted by this.
Is magellan01 right? Should we be giving McCain the benefit of the doubt because of his previous record? Or do the last 4-8 years weight more heavily? I don’t want to be unjust. Note: this will not make me vote for McCain. But it might make me more contented to lose to him in November if that should happen.
Heroism does not signify or guarantee a lifetime of Integrity in all things.
Sure, we Humans like to think that it does, instilling our heros with all the virtues of the world as a template for others to emulate. But this is a false path. The Romans instilled their gods with human virtues and frailties. Our modern hero stories are returning to that truth.
Anyone can be mistaken for a hero if they’re placed in a difficult situation where Doing The Right Thing is what you have to do to survive. Someone can also be mistaken for being honorable for consistently Doing The Right Thing when it doesn’t count.
It’s a rare situation where both choice and import come together to really allow someone to show their true character. He might have had a long, stellar, honorable history, and that would show he has more integrity than most politicians… but maybe he is only now being faced with choices that call on his character. And some folks find it wanting.
Yes. It’s reasonable to do so: honor is not something you earn once, and then place on a shelf as a permanent record, forever untouchable. A person who used to be heroic but is now a self-serving ferretoid deserves the same level of respect as a person who used to be a virgin but is now a disease-ridden mattress monkey: i.e., not much.
Senator McCain was an honorable man of good military character and a fine Senator. In recent years his integrity has been compromised: after serving honorably in the Senate without particular fame or distinction for so many years, it became clear that every Republican who backed Bush faced an uphill battle to the White House. All the big-money interests turned to McCain as their only real hope, and the money seems to have turned McCain’s head. All the yes-men whispering into his ear, telling him he was the best man to be President, have guided him off course. It’s hard to be a maverick when you’re surrounded with sycophants.
Was McCain a hero? Is he now? I couldn’t say. It’s true he underwent terrible hardship; does torture and privation automatically make you a hero? That seems like too broad a standard. I admired him, and would have called him heroic, more because he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and cross party lines, even when his opinion was unpopular. That kind of heroism I admire: the ability to withstand peer pressure and stand up for what you believe in. It’s the kind of heroism that the damn country was founded on.
McCain used to have it. Now, not so much.
What about Kerry? Well, both men were able to stand up against the government to decry an unpopular war. Both wars were a fiasco, both men spoke out. And yet McCain, the man who flip-flopped and now parrots the party line, is the hero; and Kerry is painted as the unpatriotic ferretoid.
I’d say that you shouldn’t always do so - it’s not really fair to automatically assume all people will become scoundrels as soon as they get a whiff of politics, as tempting as that sounds. But likewise we shouldn’t never; if a formerly honourable person does indeed do something dishonourable then it’s they who cause disappointment and disgust.
Well, in John McCain’s case in Viet Nam, to my understanding I think he had a choice, and made the heroic one, so there’s no mistake there. Beyond John McCain, I agree that Heroism is sometimes a matter of surviving when someone happens to be looking.
Yes, I hate it when people automatically assume that anyone who is in politics is automatically a corrupt scoundrel. I think most people go into politics, as they go into medicine, with the best of good intentions. And, like medicine, I think the field makes a lot of them very blase’ about it over time; the intentions are still good, but the scrupulousness, the attention to detail over morality has faded. This may be a good aspect of Obama’s relatively short time in politics - the bloom may still be on. But that’s off topic.
What makes McCain a hero is that he chose to go through torture and privation rather than to cooperate with his captors. The element of choice is what makes him a hero, not the suffering itself.
What unpopular war did McCain decry? As far as I can tell, he never met a war he didn’t like, although he disliked the way Iraq was being prosecuted until the surge.
ETA: I should have combined these three posts into one, but I was lazy and inattentive. Sorry!
Our campaign funding is corrupting. Pols spend a huge percentage of their time on fund raising and begging. It gives us part time leaders. They all become money whores.
McCain did not want to sell out. He had to. The power and oil companies have their claws in him.
I am sure some people have their claws in Obamas back side too. But he is relatively a clean slate. If the campaign funding does not change ,he will have to sell out to succeed. It is the system.
Well, which is more indicative of how honorable a president (which is of course a political position) a person would be? His political actions of recent years, or his non-political actions half a century ago? If your goal is to vote for who will be the most honorable president, the choice seems pretty obvious to me.
If you want to give the presidency as a reward for past suffering, then let the ‘Make A Wish’ foundation choose for us.
Let’s not forget that McCain does not have an unblemished record of public service, even. While cleared of unethical behavior, the Senate Ethics Committee chastised McCain for “exercising poor judgment” in meeting with banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating.
I unequivocally believe McCain is a genuine hero. But being a war hero doesn’t mean one has good judgment. Otherwise, the Ethics Committee must have made a huge mistake in questioning the character and actions of a war hero. But that makes zero sense to me.
I’m willing, cheerfully, to give Buzz Aldrin a pass for punching Bart Sibrel, even if it happened today after Aldrin passes Sibrel on the sidewalk and just leans over and pops him one for no apparent reason.
Beyond that, nah. Trouble is, it goes too far by media with too many hours to fill and normal human foibles are trumpeted endlessly until the next human foible comes to light. Geez, you’re electing a President, not a Saint. If he had a spotless personal history, he’d be totally unsuited to the job.
But he didn’t choose to be in that position. Is he more heroic than somebody who never got captured?
I have a huge problem with saying “because he chose to suffer privation, he is a hero” because in general, I avoid painting with too wide a brush. Lots of people choose to suffer privation for less than heroic reasons: ignorance, stupidity, stubbornness, etc. Understand that I’m not saying McCain isn’t heroic, I just don’t think the mathematical equation “voluntary suffering = hero” is rigorous enough.
Well, yeah, that’s what I mean. It wasn’t a popular position but he stood for it anyway. I respect that. I don’t respect how he’s suddenly become a Bush lapdog — an anybody lapdog, for that matter. I wouldn’t respect him if he suddenly became an Obama lapdog. Or my lapdog. Don’t got any respect for lapdogs, period.
But in this case, McCain had what sounds to have been a very clear cut choice (it may not in reality have been this clear cut because things hardly ever are, but this is what we’ve been told, so I have no reason to disbelieve it): Cooperate with the Viet Cong, and we’ll stop beating the shit out of you, or don’t cooperate and we’ll keep you forever and make you miserable pretty much every second of it. Since McCain viewed cooperation as betrayal of country and his fellow soldiers and captives, he refused to cooperate, or so the story goes and so I believe.
It’s not the actual choice of suffering that makes him heroic so much as the reason for the choice of suffering. Maybe guys who didn’t get captured would have been or were in other circumstances every bit as heroic, maybe they weren’t. How is that relevant? To me, heroism is sacrificing self for the greater good. This is something McCain used to do, and did do during his time as a POW.
I still think this is too simple an equation. One could argue that by sacrificing his principles for his party, McCain is being more heroic by agreeing with Bush. If you agree that Bush is attempting to act in the greater good, then by agreeing with Bush, McCain is sacrificing himself for the greater good. (I think it’s more heroic to resist, personally. That’s why I have a problem with broad definitions.)
In any case, I don’t think “used to be a hero” equals “free pass where nobody ever questions him ever again.” Look at people like Joe McCarthy: Tailgunner Joe successfully parlayed his heroic WWII exploits into tremendous political power by draping himself in the flag of heroism. He’s exactly the reason why we should question former heroes, especially when they are not, at present, behaving heroically.
Personally, I wouldn’t presume to judge what a POW would do under the circumstances McCain found himself in, though the story I linked to does give me pause in terms of what happened to the individuals after their release. The Forrestal story sounds like a whackjob conspiracy theory.
You won’t see anyone of any standing among the Democrats bringing up any of this stuff, though, and for good reason. There’s plenty of legitimate grounds for arguing against McCain without dragging in this kind of muck. Pity the Kerry Swiftboaters didn’t have a similar attitude.