Looking Forward

Neither nor. I would submit that you are holding the blathering of a talking head who is saying something just to be saying something up to an impossible standard: well-reasoned argument.

Like most Australians of a certain age, I grew up knowing relatives and neighbours who had been POWs in WW II, mostly of the Japanese. To a person, these people would not speak of the experience. And I never once heard anyone use their POW experience as an excuse for or in explanation of some behaviour or some trait. It is is hard to view McCain has having anything like the moral integrity of these earlier POWs.

But surely the point is that McCain was captured and taken to a place where there was no freedom, no security, where people could be arbitrarily tortured and murdered, where there was (seemingly) no hope and no chance of escape and thought…..

‘At last! I have my future vision for America!’ Wouldn’t it be great if the United States was just like this?’

And lo, it came to pass.

@6: Depending on how you get your news, you’d be forgiven for thinking McCain is reluctant to recount his time in Hanoi. But there’s a difference between (1) not talking about your POW experience and (2) telling people you’re not going to talk about your POW experience, before going on to talk about your POW experience. McCain is notorious for doing the latter; journalists (those ‘on the swing’, as the folks over at TPM have it) are notorious for repeating his claim but never calling him on the contradiction.

Shoot — html tags for *small* *supercript* didn’t work for the “TM.”

I don’t understand this post. OK, let’s assume that public opinion is not just and fair. Why take Brokaw to task for that?

Evidently you didn’t watch any of the Democratic Convention.

Every attack on John McCain began with “I respect John McCain, John McCain is a great war hero, we are grateful to John McCain for his service to the country. Fulsome, even.

Followed by, “But he is wrong.”

Nice inoculation against the inevitable POW defense.

Ugh. Double quote mark after “that way,” and “they’re view” should be “their view”. Ick.

Re: 17. OK, thanks.

virgil — come on, you think we were all Clintonites? The problem with Clinton was that his anger management issues were low on his list of vices. Sure, it was a problem, and one of several reasons that he was a lousy president (worse, in my opinion, than his predecessor, though, obviously, his successor is unsurpassable). The issue here is the unstable way that McCain’s defenders use his time in jail as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Either it was good for his character, in which case it is no defence at all against his (numerous) flaws, or it was not in which case it is at best irrelevant and should not be raised.

well i cant tell whom to vote for at this early , but i am leaning towards obama. Furthermore, the GOP base is not even warming up to mccain (of course, i could be wrong) and even though it’s still early in the game, this just proves to show how we see our candidates to-date. i know i will get burned for this, but i think mccain is a warmonger. i get the impression that he doesn’t care to what happens to our troops in the middle east and the other parts of the world. Can’t we just all get along? i think it is time for a purification; i think it is time for a change; i think it is time for obama time. Now that the candidates are set for the US Presidential Election, Barack Obama and John McCain are beginning to set the tone for their campaign.Joe Biden has now been officially introduced as Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential selection. i just saw this video in pollclash but you can see the video in http://pollclash.com

See, because if it’s to McCain’s credit, then it’s to the other vets’ discredit.
And we don’t want to be saying that, do we?

OK, I was looking for a way to point out that McCain truly needs therapy without being too insulting to him.

McCain really did serve as a vietnamese POW. He says he really did get tortured. It had to be as bad for PTSD as a year or two in the infantry. Not like being Donald Trump. Of course, it’s possible McCain did get the treatment he needed and I didn’t hear about it. Perhaps after treatment he developed a reputation as a well-balanced sane human and I didn’t hear about that.

Some of his fellow POWs say that he cooperated with the north vietnamese and that’s why he got special treatment and the offer to go home early, not because his father was a top admiral. They say the reason he was kept separate from the other POWs was that the vietnamese needed to protect him from them. But they weren’t really in a position to know such things. False rumors get started in POW camps, often about anybody who’s unpopular.

It wouldn’t work to try to swiftboat him about it. The people who think a man’s honor should keep him from breaking under torture are the sort who were really mad at Kerry for coming out against the war, for working for the enemy. McCain swears he was true to the flag and that’s good enough for them. Similarly if the north vietnamese records have something interesting — who are you going to believe, John McCain or a bunch of north vietnamese?

Apart from such things, though, there’s a chance McCain will be the US president. So it’s vitally important that he get therapy. This is likely not to be a workable campaign issue either, because the sort of people who’d vote for McCain don’t believe in therapy. But it’s important for the nation.

Because he might wind up the US president, in charge of the nukes.

So it’s important that he get therapy.

I said that already, I’m not certain he hasn’t had therapy.

If he has had extensive therapy it ought to be widely known. He should be ready to announce that his mental problems are cured.

I would like to humbly suggest a netologism, except I’m not feeling all that humble right now.
“House troll”.
A kind of semi-benign and sometimes amusing trollish commentator operating within house rules, such as they may be, often or sometimes mostly in defense of the home team.
As opposed to garden-variety omni-antagonistic trolls.
Not to point specifically to or at any specific commentator.
Ha.

A counter-factual

“Because we obviously don’t want a President who can’t be held to account for any potential failings or weaknesses.”

Actually, all the evidence is that a president who can’t be held accountable is exactly what we crave.

Look at the small things. You yourself capitalize “President”, even when referring to the office in the abstract, and not as the title of a particular president, where accepted usage does capitalize, as in “President Bush”. Why?

Look at the big things. I have never heard anyone, even people who profess concern over an “imperial presidency”, express anything but admiration for the sign Harry Truman had on his desk while he was president, “The Buck Stops Here.” This is a truly astonishing statement, if judged either by what our constitution says about the duties of the president to faithfully execute the will of Congress, or if judged more generally by the minimum subordination to the law that would make the president even a constitutional monarch (forget chief magistrate of a republic!), rather than an elected dictator. But we will brook no second-guessing of the president, no constraints on him by any other force in our political universe, no stoppage of the buck anywhere but on his (His?) desk. It’s all well and good for Justice Coke to have told James II in 1688 that he was beneath God and the Law. James II was just the King of England. But if he had tried that in 2008 with the US President, by God, we’ld have sent him to Guantanamo for hating America so much as to question our Sovereign.