Let John McCain explain his position himself. Err… positions? He seems to have some sort of a running amnesia about his own actions and opinions on this thing.
“Would you be in favor of a referendum amongst the Iraqi people to make a decision whether US troops should stay or leave?”
“No, no more than I should have a referendum in the United States of America.”
“We talked about the majority of Americans wanting out of Iraq. At what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?”
“Well, again, I disagree with what the majority of American people want.”
Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the car when passing through South Carolina, a South Carolina state senator has stepped up to the plate, not just willing, but proud to reveal the TRUTH, regardless of what the state’s tourism bureau may be trying to deceive out-of-staters into thinking.
That they’re a bunch of redneck inbred neonazis? Hmm. Maybe he should rewrite the message if it’s not communicating the message that he really wants us to receive.
Click through and read those comments. Unbelievable.
With friends like this, McCain doesn’t need enemies.
The other day I got a recorded call about the McCain rally today in South Portland. The recording said that persons of all political persuasions were welcome, so what the heck, I pressed ‘1′. The next day I got a call from a nice lady who gave me the specifics. She sounded a bit disappointed that I wasn’t bringing a crowd of supporters with me. McCain’s not the most popular guy in this part of the state. He’s not all that popular anywhere in the state, which always seems to go Democratic as a whole anyway.
I was surprised I was the only democratic mole at the rally, not to mention being one of the hated “bloggers”. Inside the yellow tape, my IMPEACH CHENEY baseball cap would undoubtedly have blown my cover had I worn it. The protesters were occupying their assigned space on the sidewalk above, while the cozy (<500 supporters) rally took place on the grounds of the new Maine Military Museum, in what looks to have been a converted pumping station.
I got a bunch of photos, as you can see. There wasn’t anything to video, but people were polite and allowed me to move around until I got the shot I was looking for.
We milled around not very long, and the bus showed up about 20 minutes early. It drove around the crowd, down below the platform. They started about 20 minutes early and finished just before the rain.
Olympia Snowe, Republican Senator, introduced Susan Collins, other Republican Senator, who bragged about how she traveled “everywhere” with McCain, including Antartica. Or was it the Arctic? She was a little confused on that point. That makes two of them, since McCain is really fuzzy on geographical distinctions, too.
I guess she’s been missing those important votes then? Because McCain has missed 51 votes in a row in the Senate.
I got to hear him say repeatedly that we “succeeded” in Iraq, past tense. Over. Done. Mission accomplished, I guess. What surprised me is that I heard him say that our “success” in Iraq has resulted in our limiting Iran’s influence in the region. What? Did somebody forget to tell him that Iran and Iraq are two different countries, Iran being the one we’re supposed to still be worried about?
And then he told this amazing story about patriotism and bravery.
‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ - by Senator John McCain
‘As you may know, I spent five and one half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. In the early years of our imprisonment, the NVA kept us in solitary confinement or two or three to a cell. In 1971 the NVA moved us from these conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as 30 to 40 men to a room.
This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change and was a direct result of the efforts of millions of Americans on behalf of a few hundred POWs 10,000 miles from home.
One of the men who moved into my room was a young man named Mike Christian.
Mike came from a small town near Selma , Alabama . He didn’t wear a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old. At 17, he enlisted in the US Navy. He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967. Mike had a keen and deep appreciation of the opportunities this country and our military provide for people who want to work and want to succeed.
As part of the change in treatment, the Vietnamese allowed some prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing.
Mike got himself a bamboo needle. Over a period of a couple of months, he created an American flag and sewed it on the inside of his shirt.
Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike’s shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event.
One day the Vietnamese searched our cell, as they did periodically, and discovered Mike’s shirt with the flag sewn inside, and removed it.
That evening they returned, opened the door of the cell, and for the benefit of all of us, beat Mike Christian severely for the next couple of hours. Then, they opened the door of the cell and threw him in. We cleaned him up as well as we could.
The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept Four naked light bulbs hung in each corner of the room.
As I said, we tried to clean up Mike as well as we could. After the excitement died down, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath that dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was my friend, Mike Christian. He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag. He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to Pledge our allegiance to our flag and country.
So the next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you must never forget the sacrifice and courage that thousands of Americans have made to build our nation and promote freedom around the world. You must remember our duty, our honor, and our country.’
Now, mind you, when I say “amazing”, “incredible”, or “unbelievable”, I am not using it to flatter. All these are adjectives that literally mean that it is not believable, not credible. The word “apocryphal” came to mind. So I thought it would be good to go to the internet and check on it.
When Snopes reported on the story in 2001, it was in response to a query about whether John McCain had used this story. The answer was, yes. He used the story, which is not to say it was true.
So we have to go back further. Two interesting facts in the story were that there were 28 or so men in the cell at the time it happened, so surely there would be some corroboration to its truthfulness.
In fact, there was. The story appeared almost verbatim in the following speech, and had previously appeared in a book of stories of Vietnam POW’s.
Honoring the American Flag
From a speech by Leo K. Thorsness, recipient of The Congressional Medal of Honor.
You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts an American Flag, accompanied by the words “These colors don’t run.”
I’m always glad to see this, because it reminds me of an incident from my confinement in North Vietnam at the Hao Lo POW Camp or the “Hanoi Hilton,” as it became known. Then a Major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from 1967-1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal.
After three years, however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket.
One day as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young Naval pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran under the prison wall. Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag. Over time, we all loaned him a little soap, and he spent days cleaning the material. We helped by scrounging and stealing bits and pieces of anything he could use.
At night, under his mosquito net, Mike worked on the flag. He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on the stars.
Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, “Hey gang, look here.”
He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it as if in a breeze. If you used your imagination, you could tell it was supposed to be an American flag. When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears.
About once a week, the guards would strip us, run us outside, and go through our clothing. During one of those shakedowns, they found Mike’s flag. We all knew what would happen. That night they came for him. Night interrogations were always the worst.
They opened the cell door and pulled Mike out. We could hear the beginning of the torture before they even had him in the torture cell. They beat him most of the night.
About daylight, they pushed what was left of him back through the cell door. He was badly broken; even his voice was gone.
Within two weeks, despite the danger, Mike scrounged another piece of cloth and began another flag. The Stars and Stripes, our national symbol, was worth the sacrifice to him.
Now whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then, thousands of miles from home, in a lonely prison cell, he showed us what it is to be truly free.
You see, the other thing that jumped out at me in the story was the part about him going right back in to sew another flag of red, white, and blue fabric. And since I’ve read books about the POW experience, I wondered, why were the guards giving them red fabric?
Well, of course, they weren’t. The part of the war that John McCain is saying that “POW’s” were held in solitary confinement is the time when he was in solitary, due to his family connections and political importance. The rest of the story more or less happened, more or less was true, except for the part about McCain being there. He wasn’t. It was a lie, rather like the stories increasingly-senile Ronald Reagan used to tell about his war experiences, which were actually just scenes from movies he had acted in.
Yeah, Phil Gramm had to exit the McCain campaign this week after saying perhaps a bit too explicitly that the American people are imagining the recession. But it’s not like it isn’t anything that McBush does not agree with and has not said himself. Certainly Bush has said it, too. So here’s a cute video about it from moveon.org.
Don’t forget, McCain had a one month credit card bill of $370,000. It’s hard for me to imagine that somebody who is comfortable with spending that much money can relate to ME. But each to his own…
Here I was, pissed-off about how Congress has been colluding with the President to dismantle our Constitution, how by all appearances a shadow dictatorship has been setup, and Congress overrides a veto. Well whoop-de-doo! Maybe if it was some issue that wasn’t overwhelmingly supported by the public, or if it wasn’t too little too late, it might have meant something. But they’ve already given the keys to the crooks and stood guard while they cleaned out the national treasury and sent the money to Lichtenstein, Dubai, and the Cayman Islands for Dick Cheney and his cronies to enjoy.
So what happens but I see this 2001 Onion article, a wonderful piece of prescience. Whoever wrote it had much more on the ball than you-know-who, our chimp-in-charge.
In case you’re unaware, the Onion is a news magazine of humor, parody, and cutting insight.
Probably the best way to describe how I feel about the cartoon is that the people who are the most offended are the ones who are the butt of the joke, the media that manufactured all the stereotypes it pictures,
This guy just can’t even run his own campaign. How on earth is he ever going to be able to run the White House, let alone an entire country?
In an Americablog posting based on a New York Times article, Joe Sudbay discusses the palace intrigue that has characterized the McCain campaign from the start. The left hand definitely doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and now that Karl Rove is involved, it never will, and neither will we. All the more reason not to vote for McCain. He shows no leadership at all.
And now, yet another reason not to vote for McCain. The guy who can’t use a computer in his home without the help of his wife now says he hates “the bloggers”, and calls cable television “The Cables”.
No love lost here, but I’m not sure if he meant to imply that he also hated all of my other blogs, of which this is the only one that is politically-oriented.
Are you really saying, John, that you hate icanhascheezburger? How dare you! That is about as unamerican as a person can get!
How far is it from calling cable tv “The cables” to saying that the intenet is a series of tubes?
The Jed Report has posted comments on a Think Progress analysis of McCain campaign claims about health care. I was going to write something about comments about this report, but then I got around to reading it.
Gah. Everybody should read it.
McCain’s health care “proposal” is vague at best. But in the absence of anything solid, this looks like a reasonable analysis to me. However, the more I thought about it, the more I figured a flow chart would be better.
Well, maybe you, maybe not you. It seems that what’s mostly up due to those economic stimulus checks is porn. Guys are hunkering down, realizing that there’s going to be a long dry spell ahead. They’re buying porn of all sorts.
