A couple of weeks ago Barack Obama was raked over the coals for saying that the lives of the soldiers in Iraq had been wasted. Many on the right accused him of being insensitive to the troops. Even moderates were saying that it was evidence of his inexperience that he could make such a foolish gaffe. He eventually was forced to make a public apology. It was actually the subject of a couple of threads here on the Dope.
Yesterday in an interview with David Letterman, John McCain said “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.”
I eagerly await his vilification by the right and the editorials questioning his qualifications for running for office. :rolleyes:
I was actually going to start a thread pitting the Democrats about this. From CNN
Why the hell are the Dems even commenting on this? Don’t they remember how stupid Republicans looked when they demanded an apology from Obama? What a bunch of tools.
Honest to Og, once you’ve figured out that one side is filled with ignoramuses, you have to go out and find that the other side is too. We’re doomed. Doomed, I tells ya.
Yeah, the pile-on of Obama was completely ridiculous. The people who did so were idiots.
So any Democrats like Karen Finney who complain about this are also idiots. Just because Republicans are idiots doesn’t make it ok for Democrats to be idiots. If George Bush jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?
the proper response of the Dems should have been to put up the sound bites of those who demanded that OBama retract/appologize, folllowed by McCain’s remark, then the crickets chirping.
So both sides of the political equation think that it is disrespectful to point out that the leadership, with the assent of a nearly unanimous legislature, and an overwhelming mandate of the people decided to start a war with no objective defined might just have been a waste of lives?
Oh, no wait, there was an objective defined. Weapons of mass destruction, that’s it. Did we find them yet?
Anyone who held office when this war started should be driven out into the streets.
Angry mobs with pitchforks and torches ain’t even enough.
Barack Obama retracted his comments on his own, and rather quickly. I think outrage after that was a bit misplaced.
McCain can do what he wants with his remarks, but I don’t agree with them, and I don’t think he was smart to use that term, especially given the way such a comment would likely be taken by lots of people, some of whom are genuinely hurt by it and some of whom want to make political hay.
The thing is … it illustrates a point I was trying to make in the “Gore is a hypocrite” thread:
The right is willing to smear the left over anything, no matter how trivial or unsubstantiated. Nancy’s Pelosi’s airplane. Al Gore’s electrical bill. John Kerry’s war record. Bill Clinton’s haircut. Barack Obama’s elementary school. Howard Dean’s scream. And because of the power of right-wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter such trivialities get inflated into major news stories.
Personally, I don’t think this apology is enough. He’ll have to go visit some of the vets sleeping in their own pee over at Walter Reed in order to regain the nation’s confidence.
The irony is that the right-wing’s reactions get played up in the media, and become part of the news. Including the constant assertions by the right-wiong about a left-wing bias in the media. Multiple levels of irony there!
Oh, and both Senator Obama and Senator McCain were correct in their original statements. The lives of the American military have been wasted in Iraq. Of course, that’s no reflection on those fine young men and women serving there: it’s a reflection on the peoiple in Washington who sent them over to Iraq.
I’ve seen Bush bashed for everything from how he pronounces words to the way he smiles. I have yet to see him pitted for any significant thing like making “freedom” a dirty word or trampling on our liberties. From my perspective, both sides smear each other with equal abandon. The right thinks the left is full of effete elitist cowards, and the left thinks the right is full of knuckle dragging idiots.
But my point was about the irony of the claim. If the claim is that one side smears the other only for trivial things, then the claim itself is a trivial one. That’s just something people do. All people. Me, you, and people on the right.
