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After McCain's plane was shot down, he fell into a lake in Hanoi, breaking a leg and both arms as he ejected from the plane. A crowd gathered and pulled him out of the water, kicking and hitting him as his right foot dangled next to his left knee at a 90 degree angle. Instead of being treated under the rules of the Geneva Convention, someone smashed a rifle butt into his shoulder and broke it. A bayonet was stuck into his ankle and his groin. Taken to the Hanoi Hilton, as the prison for American POWs was called, he was stretched out on the cold floor -- and over the next several days beaten again and again, his broken arms and leg included. They let him lay there for days in excruciating pain, lying in vomit and his own waste. Eventually he was moved to a hospital, never washed or cleaned, to lie with rats and swarming mosquitoes. His interrogators came to the "hospital" and -- repeatedly -- savagely beat him day after day as he shrieked in agony. Then it was back to his prison cell, where one guard would hold him while others took turns beating him over and over again. His ribs were broken, his teeth cracked. Both arms were broken, for the second time, neither set properly when finally treated.
Very interesting article. Also addresses "Appeasement" - the word that sent Obama into an apoplectic fit.
Can we not say your undying and unquestionable support for Obama is not the same?
Go ahead....you gonna need some sort of evidence though. Unlike you Clinton supporters who go from supporting Hillary, to bashing the democratic party, to kissing up to McCain; my stance has always been firm and steady.
I think I have stated before I could no more vote for Hill&Bill than have my fingers cut off.
I am a conservative - who will vote for McCain.
I'm just rooting Hill&Bill on - to take it all the way to the convention floor, where the least battered, bloodied and bruised will go against McCain as serious damaged goods. That's my agenda.
What's wrong jnestorr? No empathy for Mac? Not even a tiny bit of respect for what he went through?
I think I have stated before I could no more vote for Hill&Bill than have my fingers cut off.
I am a conservative - who will vote for McCain.
I'm just rooting Hill&Bill on - to take it all the way to the convention floor, where the least battered, bloodied and bruised will go against McCain as serious damaged goods. That's my agenda.
What's wrong jnestorr? No empathy for Mac? Not even a tiny bit of respect for what he went through?
Okay....i usually treat politics as politics - never wanting to get into the liberal/conservative, left/right, or far left/far right. But since you have re-introduced me to that, I have one simple question for you: As far as i know the following people consider themselves conservatives
Lou Dobbs
Glen Beck
Sean Hannity
Rush Limbaugh....
Are your ideas and interests same as these folks listed above? If they are, lord have mercy then.....
No empathy for Mac? Not even a tiny bit of respect for what he went through?
Everyone respects what McCain went through. This Memorial Day article sets up an ad hominem argument and uses McCain's horrible suffering to suit its own purposes, which I find pretty callous.
The author is warning against appeasement. He uses McCain's ordeal as a tool to manipulate us into saying No! to Barack Obama and his naive, Chamberlainesque predilections. And obliquely, to vote for the war hero "with the odd little wave" who suffered for our sins. I find it outrageous that the author uses McCain - truly a war hero - to make a cheap political point on Memorial Day, and by cheap, sentimental writing techniques too.
The article talks about the 1975 congressional refusal to commit further funds to S. Vietnam and Cambodia, calling it an appeasement, I suppose of the American people. This occurred two years after the Paris Peace Accords, 12 years after we went into Vietnam. McCain was released in March 1973 as a direct result of the Paris Peace Accords, which called for the withdrawal of all US troops within 60 days of its January signing. If the American people hadn't demanded an end to the 12-year US involvement who knows how long John McCain would have stayed in North Vietnam?
The author wants to connect this funding cutback (by Democrats, voted in overwhelmingly in 1974) to the vividly-described torture of John McCain. But he can't directly, so he uses a kind of trompe-l'oeil to make you connect them in your mind. He moves on instead to the Pol Pot regime which swept in once the US was gone and the coast was clear. He reminds us that they were evil and that the cruelty to John McCain was evil. And that Democrats opened the gates to the Khmer Rouge. Thus, he connects the Democrats - voted in as a result of the people's mass revulsion at such Nixon administration maneuvers as secretly invading and carpet-bombing Cambodia - to evil.
The author reminds us that the next time we see McCain and his "odd little wave," to remember that evil exists in the world, and to not vote for those who would be fooled by it. Deflatingly, Obama has said time and again that he will never agree to anything detrimental to the United States or its interests. He only said that, in contrast to Bush's damaging policy, he will at least offer to listen. That's all.
Why does the author talk about McCain's suffering this particular Memorial Day, why not last? Because Obama and McCain weren't running for office last year.
"It is worthwhile to remember just why one American presidential candidate can't wave to the crowds in the same graceful, elegant style of his opponent." This is cheap, manipulative, insulting bilge - insulting to us. We do remember. We do know. Some of us know a lot better and a lot more personally that this author does. And I think it's pretty shabby to use McCain's very real suffering in this way, and on Memorial Day, to try to score a cheap political point.
Oddly, the article says "the type of men who did this to John McCain were fully capable of doing this to their own fellow citizens." McCain's captors were North Vietnamese, not Cambodian.
Last edited by delusianne; 05-27-2008 at 04:27 PM..
Reason: tweaking.
Go ahead....you gonna need some sort of evidence though. Unlike you Clinton supporters who go from supporting Hillary, to bashing the democratic party, to kissing up to McCain; my stance has always been firm and steady.
What does that little thing under your display name say?
Oh thats right yet you can support someone who has talked the entire campaign out of all three sided of his mouth!
Where have you been critical of Obama? If you can show me ill gladly shut up.
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That's my agenda.
