Monday, June 30, 2008
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"[A]side From Being Tortured, What Did McCain Do to Excel in the Military?"
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Posted by:
Carol Platt Liebau at
10:11 PM
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Lefty John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog wants to know: "Honestly, aside from being tortured, what did John McCain do to excel in the military?"
If this doesn't expose the gap -- in sensibility, understanding and everything else -- between the left and the right in this country, nothing ever will. For sheer ingratitude and disgracefulness, it's a hard question to beat.
I'm waiting for all the proponents of "civility" who condemned "conservative bloggers" for criticizing John Kerry's stories about his military service and his behavior after it to start sputtering with outrage.
These are the people who support Barack Obama. This is the kind of argument they're willing to make to defeat John McCain.
Here are the facts for any honest lefty who wants to traffic in truth rather than smears. An overview:
From his five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp to his tenure as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, John McCain’s Navy record boils down to a series of unadorned paragraphs that bestow upon him some of the nation’s top military honors.
That includes 17 awards for excellence, including the Legion of Merit, where he was praised for providing Navy leaders “with sage advice and sound judgment for enacting critical legislation during a period of severe fiscal constraint” in his capacity as liaison to the Senate from the Navy’s Office of Legislative Affairs.
And for details on the torture that Aravosis dismisses so cavalierly, check out this podcast (##89-91) (HT: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air). It's not pretty. What's more, he was "singled out" for especially brutal treatment because of his father's and grandfather's roles in the Navy. And yet he still refused the enemy's offers for early release.
John McCain wasn't my first choice to be Republican nominee. But the sheer indecency of these kinds of tactics may be helping to ensure that even less-than-enthused conservatives will start flocking to McCain's banner.
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