Well, I can agree that it’s next to nothing. Just because I think it’s a cheap shot doesn’t mean I think it’s important. There are going to be hundreds of cheap shots taken by both sides in this campaign. They really don’t mean much to me one or the other. If you want to feel it’s not a cheap shot, that’s fine with me. It’s generally in the eye of the beholder anyway. I gave may reasons, and if you don’t agree, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
No, as a matter of fact, that wasn’t what I was saying at all.
This has been another installment in the ongoing series of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
Of course, when he starts in bloviating about how “sacred” marriage is, and how it must be defended, being sacred, and all, well…
You alone will choose whether to respond and when. Don’t pin your decisions on me.
Schieffer (i before e) was the first to interrupt. Clark merely tried to finish his point. Schieffer, in fact, interrupted multiple times to make his editorial points.
There’s no reason it’s any more important to be a POW than it is to rebuild a slum. If anything, one would expect the mental and emotional damage from McCain’s alleged torture to be a detriment. It could be one reason he is so hot-headed and confused about almost everything to do with the war in Iraq.
An enlistment that lasted about three weeks and never saw combat. I wouldn’t really call that military experience.
And he didn’t either.
Listen, I’ve been pretty consistent in saying on these boards that a person’s status as a veteran essentially has very little to do with his success in either winning office or governing once he is there.
But that’s a far cry from what you are saying, which is that McCain’s military experience is totally meaningless except to the degree that it is totally disqualifying. I don’t think that is an argument that will gain a lot of traction with the voting public.
If John McCain’s five years in the Hanoi Hilton do in fact make one more qualified for being President, then I can think of someone who’s far more qualified than he.
Remember a couple of decades ago, a young woman was freed after seven years of captivity? She’d been picked up while hitchhiking, and the guy who gave her a lift abducted her and turned her into his personal sex slave for seven years, as well as inflicting all sorts of other tortures on her.
Maybe she should be President. Or maybe we should acknowledge that, regardless of the debt we owe to the heroism of McCain and others similarly situated, it doesn’t make them significantly more qualified for high office than anyone else is.
ETA: This was not in any way a reply to Mr. Moto’s post.
I agree .That is a crappy defense against the idea that the Repubs savaged McCains military record far beyond what the Dems will do. It would be fair to use that as a guideline.
Besides military men have been crappy presidents. Grant and Eisenhower let the party a free reign for corruption. The military experience obviously did not translate to President very well.
???
Actually I think Eisenhower was quite a good president. In any case I should demand a cite for your allegations of corruption.
I owe you a Coke.
He at least knew how to tax the hell out of the rich. I’ll say that for him.
They have ejection seats that will actually work from a standing plane and not kill the pilot?
-Joe
Actually, I believe that McCain’s military experience is a good reason he shouldn’t be President. When all you’ve got is a hammer, all the world’s a nail.
I’d much rather have a President whose first response to any issue isn’t “send in the troops.”
Leave it to you to find an extraordinarily biased site, present it as established fact and misrepresent the details, inventing parity that simply doesn’t exist.
Thanks for not letting me down.
Love,
Shayna Hussein Norman
Sure. We were plane guard one night for the USS John C. Stennis (meaning that as a cruiser, we were some 1500 yards behind her) when a pilot on deck ejected and landed in the water. We had to reverse our screws and do a full stop quickly to avoid running him over, while the boat crew lowered the boat down.
There was a slight snafu or two, but within a few minutes the pilot was recovered and returned to the carrier, slightly the worse for wear.
I don’t think the seats in the 1960s were much different, but the problem would have been that McCain would have landed in the water while the entire ship was engaged in fighting a major fire. Getting him would have been an additional problem to deal with.
There’s no guarantee he would have landed in the water, and even if he had, there was still significant chance of injury. The much safer thing to do what what he did, which was to make the easy, two foot hop back down to the flight deck. Ejecting would have been stupid.
So? You’re simply bolding two instances where Clark was in the right. (It was a NATO operation, and he but told the truth to the press.) How does either of them reflect badly on Clark’s “integrity and character,” as Shelton said?
But that’s just it, to me. The “smarminess” I alluded to was a general sense of uneasiness about Kerry’s convictions regarding his military service. On the one hand he was ashamed of it, so much so that he threw medals that honor war wounded over a fence during a protest, but on the other hand when it became time to run for president, those medals became politically expedient as a means of certifying his patriotism, even though he had disowned them earlier in life.
I’m not saying that Kerry wasn’t qualified for office, or that he isn’t allowed to change his mind about anything he wants, but it certainly didn’t help to defuse the GWB campaign from painting him as a flip-flopper, even though Kerry’s military service was of greater merit than GWB’s minimal participation in the Armed Forces.
This is exactly why I think Clark is off base about McCain. At the very least, comments like that are not helpful to Obama.