Friday, April 24, 2009

This is ONE Reason Why John McCain Would NEVER Be a Hero to ME

Someone took exception to my statement once for saying that John S. McCain was not a hero. Basically I told them I didn't care what they thought, I had my reasons that just because he had been in the military didn't automatically mean he was a hero. Just because he had been a POW didn't make him a hero.

Tweety gave him his Hardball award tonight..both for those reasons.. and hung that hero label on him.. Here we go again..

Well, here is another person's take on John S. McCain's status as a hero.. Listen to this short clip.. and thanks to Laffy from Political Carnival for pointing it out to me.



Now, read what else this young man had to say. He is an Iraq War Veteran. I would call him a hero before I would hang it on McCain.. trust me.

Here is a section that I found very chilling, from a young man who was in the middle of hero worship and was now having his hopes and dreams dashed. Put yourself in his shoes and know he was seeing that this man he had worshiped had now developed feet of clay after all those years.

“John McCain is here today because he had strong survival instinct,” explained Jerel Jones, a Forrestal sailor who produced a documentary about the disaster. As the fire raged, forklifts driven by enlisted men pushed burning planes overboard. Stunned and singed, you went below decks and helped jettison bombs. The ship reeled from explosions. You “thought it was going to sink.” But with the fire out and the crew in chaos, you left the Forrestal, catching a press helicopter and reporting for duty to a front-page celebrity interview with The New York Times—routine ejection, indeed!
“Hours after the fire that ravaged the flight deck and killed so many fellow crewmen,” the Times reported, “Commander McCain sat in Saigon and shook his head, ‘It was such a great ship.’ ”
When asked about the crewmen, 138 of whom would perish, you remarked that the enlisted men “certainly would have survived, had they not stayed to help the pilots fight the fire.”
Years ago, I marveled at your strong survival instinct. Today, after comparing the credible accounts of this apocalypse at sea with my own naval experience, I’m baffled that you left your shipmates behind to plant the seeds of your public image. Furthermore, it seems selfish that your words relegated the blue-shirts to being mere helpers, when they—not the pilots—saved the day. But strangest of all is that the accounts of the fire mention nothing of your mourning for the dead who once packed your parachute. While your shipmates were still grieving aboard the Forrestal in the Philippines, your autobiography implies that you grieved on vacation in the French Riviera and London before transferring off the Forrestal and lunging back to war in a matter of weeks.
Forgive me if you know something that the public doesn’t—I could understand if your grief was private—but what were your priorities as a leader? Where did the troops who sacrificed their lives under you fit into your celebrity lifestyle?


You can read the entire article here at The Daily Beast, and before you jump and say oh that's just a liberal rag.. No, remember it isn't. John McCain's own daughter writes there...lol

John Yoo, the prolific author of torture-policy memoranda, cast a harrowing glimpse into what Dick Cheney described on Meet the Press as America’s new “Dark Side.” When asked whether the president could “crush the testicles of a terror suspect’s child,” Yoo responded, “I suppose it depends on why the president thought he needed to do that.”
America needed John McCain to take a stand. By enduring torture, senator, you became a statesmanlike war hero, the lone American maverick who could champion the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and lasso the neck of an administration run amok. But there was a catch: The bill that passed unanimously on your moral authority concealed a secret compromise. The Graham-Levin Amendment made confessions obtained through torture admissible in military tribunals and precluded legal recourse for people tortured by our government.

Ironically, the same absurd logic transforms your forced-confessions from Vietnam into treason against America. Worse still, a shifting, legalistic definition of torture permitted abusive and unethical practices to continue under a darker shroud of secrecy. In 2006, the Military Commissions Act (recently declared unconstitutional) continued to hide the bodies in your closet, further limiting habeas corpus and granting outright immunity to the Bush administration. But this behavior shouldn’t surprise me, senator—back in your day, the Naval Academy’s unwritten rule was to protect the brethren who had done wrong, not to “bilge your classmates.”


The article is eye opening if you ever had any thoughts of supporting John McCain or thought he was a great hero and a champion of Veterans. He isn't. Never was, that was just his cover to make himself look good so he could get votes. But don't take my word for it. Read it. Then tell me how you feel.

2 comments:

veralynn said...

Rolling Stone had an excellent article, maybe written by Matt Taibbi (I could be wrong on that point) that was very good. It detailed his entire career, military and political, and showed it was not as heroic as he wants us to think. Just more of the repub way-surface is everything, substance is nothing.

enigma4ever said...

it was Taibbii...

great post...
and you are right about everything...
nope..not a hero...