Topic: Vote McCain - it matters
In the 2004 election, the Democratic Party served us up John Kerry and made a great deal of noise about his military record.
Never mind that ALL of his unit commanders attested to Kerry's being a hot-dog who fired off grenades for the hell of it, then signed up for one of his three Purple Hearts for self-inflicted shrapnel wounds; never mind that John Kerry was also one of the organizers of the discredited "Winter Soldiers Committee" who went around lying both about their military service and about atrocities in Vietnam that never happened; never mind that Kerry got together with the VC and the North Vietnamese before the Paris Peace Talks to help them cut the best deal they could (which they then went back on).
Never mind that John Kerry was a legend in his own mind. The Democrats went for it. Thank God the rest of us didn't - as dismal as W's been, Kerry would have been much worse - a Jimmy Carter with an attitude (well, Carter had an attitude too, he just took it out on the White House staff, who had to stand there and take abuse from that pathetic little man).
But the Democrats told the rest of us that we had to prefer a man who had actual military service under fire to someone, who like the President, served stateside (although flying air defense missions in old Delta Dart jet fighters as Bush did struck me as risky enough - the outfit that made them, Convair, had disappeared in a series of defense contractor mergers by the time George W. Bush was flying them).
But let's look at how the 2008 candidates shape up against John Kerry.
John McCain flew missions over North Vietnam for the Navy. He put his butt on the line over enemy territory every time he went up. Anti-aircraft fire got him and he was captured by the Communists, placed in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp, where he was tortured for five years. He refused an early release (the Communists wanted to show that because McCain's father was an Admiral in the Navy, he would get preferential treatment) unless every prisoner in the camp with him was released. Then they beat him most of the way to death until he wrote a phony "confession," then threw him in solitary for two years.
Of course, McCain wouldn't get any sympathy from the Democratic leadership unless he'd been suspected of Islamic terrorism and thrown into Guantanamo Bay or Al Ghraib - but we know what they're all about.
But after he and most of the other POWs were returned to America, McCain didn't do what many of us might have and take a well-deserved medical retirement.
As attorney and writer Raymond S. Kraft put it (in http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.499/pub_detail.asp)"He remained on active duty, undergoing months of treatment and physical therapy for his injuries, attended the National War College during 1973-1974, and had his flight status reinstated in 1976 when he became commanding officer of a training squadron in Florida. He turned around a low-performing unit and won the squadron its first Meritorious Unit Commendation.
Barack Obama was 15, attending high school in Hawaii.
McCain retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, after 21 years on active duty. He had been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Navy Commendation Medal, for conduct before, during, and after his years as a POW.
McCain passes the John Kerry Test with all flags flying.
Obama doesn't."
Of course, this cuts no ice with weasels like retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who opined on a Sunday morning talk show that he didn't think "getting shot down and spending five years as a POW qualifies a man to be president."
Let's put Clark's fat, stupid ass in a fighter, punch him out over enemy territory, leave him in a torture palace for five years, then check back with him. Clark's own duty consisted mainly of making crappy decisions when he was with NATO, during Bill Clinton's Balkan Adventure.
You can look in vain through Clark's own record for signs of courage or a backbone. Wesley Clark was a paper pusher in a pretty green suit. I can think of worse invective to describe this pitiful poser, with his glib dismissal of better men than he will ever be, but let's get back to the main purpose of this essay.
Are the Democrats going to switch stories on us now? Of course they are. They've built up another tin god with feet of clay, and at Denver this August they are going to fall down before him and worship at those clay feet. The "John Kerry" test goes out the window, in favor of their new... lie.
Then they will imperiously tell the rest of us to vote for a cheap lawyer for a convicted felon and Chicago slumlord, instead of a man who has given most of his life to serving us, risked it, almost given it up out of loyalty to the rest of us. And they will be wrong again.
