IS McCAIN GETTING HIS LEGS OR JUST SLEEP-WALKING?
Well, it was a dirty below-the-belt attack by Senator Barack Obama himself and at least seven high-powered so-called “surrogates” for Obama’s presidential campaign – Democratic Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Tom Harkin of Idaho, two of the most liberal-left members of Congress, Senator John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia, heir of his family’s big-oil fortune, retired Army four-star General and failed Democratic presidential wannabe Wesley Clark, former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton John Podesta, all questioning Senator John McCain’s heroic Vietnam war record and his patriotism.
As Rich Lowry of National Review pointed out, “What comparable executive experience does Barack Obama have?" John McCain flew 23 heroic military missions over North Vietnam when Obama was in elementary school. Obama’s only claim to fame is being a good debater and orator in high school and college, plus marrying a fellow flaming leftist girl who said as a young aspiring Chicago politician’s wife that she was ashamed of being an American.
It seemed like Obama’s campaign attack against John McCain was an organized pay-back for the Swift Boat veterans’ attack on John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign that zeroed in on Kerry’s testimony before Congress against his fellow sailors after he threw his Vietnam war medals away and attacked their honor and patriotism as part of a coordinated anti-Vietnam War peacenik campaign against Presidents Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s policies in Southeast Asia.
John McCain was one of the “top-gun” pilots who then flew the missions and dropped the stuff that brought North Vietnam’s military virtually to its knees before politics got in the way and the United States accepted defeat from the jaws of victory in the early 1970s.
McCain flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers, nearly lost his life in the 1967 U.S.S. Forrestal fire. Later that year while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, he was shot down, badly injured, captured as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. He was held from 1967 to 1973, experiencing horrible torture and refusing early repatriation. His war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations. How dare anyone question his honor, commitment, valor, and patriotism?
Obama was then a coddled elementary school child, pushed forward because of his minority status, probably without a serious thought about patriotism or military honor. And he’s a man who openly refuses to wear a flag lapel pin, publicly dissed the gesture of millions of Americans because he said it is not true patriotism to wear the American flag pin.
The Obama campaign’s attack against John McCain was the dirtiest, filthiest, most well-coordinated attack. Wesley Clark, an unprincipled sleaze, said McCain’s heroism as an A-4 Skyhawk fighter pilot didn’t “qualify,” that he wasn’t the leader of a significant war-time squadron, that he hadn’t made any important war-time decisions as a fighter pilot, saying, “I don’t think riding in a fighter plan and being shot down qualifies.”
What does that say to our troops when a retired four-star general says that John McCain’s service and unquestioned fighter-pilot heroism doesn’t “qualify”?
McCain’s campaign has its own slime patrol dishing dirt on Obama’s religious background and patriotism, a so-called truth squad to counter Obama’s nasty attacks, and this is the way McCain has always campaigned, so he’s good at it. That’s why former Arizona Governor Jane Hull, a Republican, openly campaigned against McCain door-to-door during his 1998 Senate re-election campaign.
McCain knows as well as anyone how to fight dirty, and things are just getting warmed up. McCain’s people will come back with his own negative attacks against Obama.
That’s probably why Obama so quickly backed away from his campaign’s organized attacks against McCain during a speech in Independence, Missouri. He knew the surrogate’s attacks against McCain’s military service and patriotism had backfired. “No further proof of such service is necessary,” he said of McCain, who himself sluffed it all off, saying of the attacks against him, “That kind of thing is unnecessary.”
Give us a break. As Fox News commentator and prize-winning former Washington Post writer Juan Williams said, Obama’s campaign “is going down faster than a four-year-old on a water slide in summer.”
I personally wish McCain had challenged Obama to a fistfight in a parking lot somewhere, where they could have slugged it out and we'd all see who is the real man.
But McCain seems to be sleep-walking through this campaign so far, as Fox News commentator Dick Morris and former Bill Clinton political adviser correctly pointed out.
And we haven’t even got to the health care debate and the implied horrendous multi-trillion-dollar cost of Senator Obama’s idea to cover 10- to 15-million illegal immigrants with his proposed government-funded Medicaid and Medicare expansion, or John McCain’s flip-flops on oil-drilling in Alaska and the Bush administration’s tax cuts.
Things are just warming up. We should all buy stock in boxing gloves and skate-board manufacturers. I’m afraid it’s going to be this kind of nasty, personal attacking campaign from now through November.
