Randi Rhodes Message Board > Noun, verb and POW

Randi Rhodes Message Board > Main Forums > Focused Interests > VICTORY 2008

Kane

Aug 21 2008, 04:37 PM

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmem...es.php#comments

QUOTE

The McCain campaign is road-testing a new argument in responding to Obama's criticism of his number-of-houses gaffe, an approach the McCain camp has never tried before: The houses gaffe doesn't matter because ... he was a POW!

"This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

For those of you who haven't kept track, the McCain campaign just recently cited McCain's POW years in explaining away the Miss Buffalo Chip gaffe, and in dealing with the allegation that he broke the rules and listened in on Barack Obama during the Rick Warren forum.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/21/m...r_n_120428.html

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QUOTE

When Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Senator John Edwards, ridiculed McCain's health care policy, his aides didn't respond with a substantive retort. Rather, they declared that their boss knew what it was like to get inadequate care "from another government." Even earlier, when the topic was about earmarks, McCain criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing funds for a museum celebrating Woodstock. He didn't know what there was to celebrate, he said, because he was "tied up" during the music festival.

The Senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, he offered that his knowledge of music "stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile." Dancing Queen, however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain's plane was shot down.
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For a guy who never wants to talk about his POW experience, he sure does spend a lot of time talking about it. And worse, he uses his POW experience like a crutch. That's offensive.

NamelessGenXer

Aug 21 2008, 04:56 PM

QUOTE (Kane @ Aug 21 2008, 05:18 PM)

That's offensive.

Make that exceedingly, nauseatingly, disgustingly, pathetically offensive.

In short, words cannot express how much I loathe this hideous shell of a man and fraud of an American.

RitaAnn

Aug 21 2008, 05:07 PM

He even said in an interview earlier this year that he really didn't love America, until he was a POW. That was brought out after the campaign accused Michele Obama of not loving America.

Kane

Aug 22 2008, 11:47 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lt-general-r...l_b_120515.html

QUOTE

McCain's POW Defense: Devaluing Our Service and His Own
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We obviously honor and respect McCain's service and the five-and-a-half years of horror that he went through at the hands of the North Vietnamese; but it's not an excuse for everything. He has already used it to explain away his infidelities in his first marriage. He's used it to defend his healthcare plan. He just the other day used it to deflect accusations of having skirted the rules of the Saddleback forum.

It's time for the Senator to stop cheapening the war experiences of thousands of vets and his fellow POWs, and his own as well, by stretching the boundaries of logic to make his POW status a wild-card rebuttal to all accusations or an answer to all difficult questions.
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When he uses his status as a veteran to deflect legitimate questions and concerns, it devalues not just his service to our country but ours as well.

So today, we ask not as Veterans for Obama, but as Veterans of America that Sen. McCain respect the service of his fellow POWs and combat veterans, and stop cheapening their service by hiding behind his own.

Lt. General Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)

This is a growing story. More people are beginning to recognize that McCain is using his POW status as a crutch.

Kane

Aug 22 2008, 12:12 PM

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmem..._start_hitt.php

Pundits And Writers Start Hitting McCain For Non-Stop P.O.W. References

QUOTE

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It's gratifying to see that pundits and writers at the news orgs are really starting to turn the screws on McCain over this.

Newsweek's Howard Fineman, for instance, says that the McCain camp is in danger of "trivializing" McCain's sacrifice.

"I think they are going to it way too many times," Fineman told MSNBC, adding that "you can't help but have admiration and respect for the guy" but that "it's become a crutch in the campaign."

"I think he is in danger of trivializing it," Fineman continued. "By the time they get to the convention in St. Paul, there might not be much of it left to use."

Ouch. Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox was even harsher, writing that the constant P.O.W.-past spewing is "weird" and "bordering on irrational."

"It's a head-spinning non sequitur, designed to distract us from something mildly troubling with the assertion of something impressive," Cox wrote of the McCain team's use of the P.O.W. stuff to deflect criticism of the houses gaffe.

"It does seem like they're flirting with Giuliani/9-11 territory here," opined Politico's Ben Smith, "in which a subject that seems utterly immune to humor, used as a first resort, suddenly becomes a running joke among your political enemies and your late night comic friends."

Another way to put this is that if you print too much currency, it devalues it. The McCain campaign is cranking out all these bills with a little "McCain as P.O.W." logo on it and is trying to use them to buy their way out of every controversy that comes along. Pretty soon the McCain team's money won't be good anywhere.

This is a good sign. The mantra that McCain doesn't like to talk about his POW experience needs to be exposed.

Ishmael

Aug 22 2008, 12:18 PM

Here's what I've been posting in comments about this story:

QUOTE

So Ahab McCain, the Senator and son and grandson of Admirals calls the Black guy an elitist? I'm a third-generation seafaring man just like Sen McCain. Unlike him, My Dad and granddad were Able Seamen sailing before the mast and I was a tin-can sonarman hunting the great steel whales. Like the sailors in Father Mapple's Sermon, I have marked McCain as a Jonah, a jinx, a hoodoo, bad luck incarnate. Death and ruin have followed him through his entire career. Just ask the crewmen of USS Forrestal or the people who had money in Lincoln Savings and Loan.

Scarred body and soul like Ahab, he is chasing his white whale of the Presidency. And he'll chase it around Good Hope and around the Horn and around the Norway Maelstrom and even around Perdition's Flames before he'll give it up.

Kane

Aug 22 2008, 12:26 PM

Lets face it, beyond the POW experience, there's nothing particularly compelling in John McCain's biography. The most newsworthy event in McCain's twenty-five plus years of political life is his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. We are often told that he's a maverick, but strangely there's nothing to actually support that myth.

McCain has never provided great political leadership. He's never inspired the public to get involved. There's no eloquent speech that McCain has given on some grand issue. There's no moment in his political history where he went out on a limb to help the little guy, or some wise piece of legislation with his name on it that we all give great thanks for. How do we know these things? Because if there was a whiff of these things in McCain's past, the media would be telling us about them ad nauseam, and McCain would certainly have them in his ads.

Is there any wonder why McCain gave up so quickly in trying to present his own biography and instead has devoted most of his ad time attempting to damage the biography of Barack Obama?

Kane

Aug 22 2008, 02:23 PM

You've got to see this!

http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/123...ffe_Free_sm.jpg

TapDuncan

Aug 22 2008, 02:35 PM

Ish--I love that, great writing if there ever was. Nice talking to you yesterday, say hi to Janet.

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