Prologue: Many people have asked questions about Senator McCain's loyalty, many have written books about it, and many are still concerned about honor.
If you listen to Senator John McCain, III, it would seem that his life was never easy…so one might think. What his life has been also may not be what it actually was. There are questions.
John S. McCain, III, was “distinguished” by being 894 out of 899 in his class at Annapolis. While at the Navy Flight School, he was a “maverick” when he crashed four jets in training, mainly from inept ability, or as was noted in McCain’s files, for “fooling around” or “hot-dogging.” In the case of his less than credible flying skills, he would be considered a ”maverick,” I suppose…in the pejorative sense.
It’s been noted that McCain’s father, Admiral John McCain, Jr., like George W. Bush’s father, got Sen. McCain out of a number of compromising situations. John McCain enjoyed chasing women, being a hotshot, taking on the air of a “maverick” frat-type, and he had little or no concern about being a mediocre student.
The fifth jet that crashed for John McCain got him captured during the Vietnam War. McCain tossed and turned for five years in the Hanoi Hilton (Hoa Lo prison) in Vietnam. Later, he bragged about how he did this and that in his cell, and stood tall in the face of the enemy. While he was in Hoa Lo prison, the war fought on and soldiers died.
''O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.'' -U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1973 article by POW John McCain
However, how does one truly know what John McCain endured, or know what he said to the Vietcong or anyone else, for that matter? Of course, in his own book, Faith of My Fathers, he wrote that he told them certain information in order to get medical care.
Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I [McCain] did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship's name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant.'' Page 193-194, Faith of My Fathers by John McCain.
But, what did he actually do or say? We weren’t there. People, who supposedly have been subjected to stress, often exaggerate what they believe they did, or thought they did, or thought they may have done. (Patti Heart, for instance.) Some people are brainwashed, the Stockholm Syndrome or the “Manchurian Candidate” effect.
John, in view of his “maverick-imagined” life, poor flight record, and mediocre academics, is hardly the person to tell us like it was with any clear authority. This does not discount any severe pain he may have suffered, but it brings into question…questions about his veracity of memory. Mythology is easier to stomach than the actual truth and a lot more appealing to a constituency.
Suffer he did, but many other P.O.W.s suffered harsher treatment and longer imprisonments, and those who suffered saw the futility of war and began to speak out against such atrocities (and some kept quiet in respect for the dead), especially for wars that are not and were not on a par with World War I or II. Many others, unlike McCain, have their names on the Vietnam Memorial not far from McCain’s Washington, DC windows.
It has been well-documented that once the VC had McCain’s “number,” as the son of an admiral, the VC were less likely to end his life; he had: bị bắt, bị tịch thu làm chiến lợi phẩm (become a prize) for them. They got him sound medical care, according to what he wrote in his book. Unlike Barack Obama’s book(s), McCain had a co-author for his book, or a “ghost” writer.
RE: THE USS LIBERTY:
USS Liberty before the attack
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USS LIBERTY after the attack
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The reason treason has come up in this column is that according to a number of authentic and knowledgeable voices John McCain sided with the Israelis very weak story about its sneak attack/terrorist attack on the USS Liberty.
Families/survivors of the USS Liberty believe that John McCain and his father did and have done to U.S. sailors what the VC had done to him: set their lives into a perpetual wheel of horror. Like his father, Admiral McCain, who conducted the inquiries into the sneak attack and set aside the truth and walked away from his own Navy men, Sen. McCain, by not accepting the failure of his father and the commission, also walked away from the truth with his honor in tatters.
Israel, the country John McCain loves to love and hopes to impress, literally used a terrorist attack to massively damage a U.S. ship and kill 34 of its crewmen.
Many have asked why John McCain did not and will not acknowledge the truth of about the attack. He has consistently turned his back on the matter for many years. One reason, I believe, is that Sen. John McCain has a greater interest in his own vanity instead of desiring the truth. You must desire truth to have the truth, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out.
(On the afternoon of 8 June 1967, while in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula, USS Liberty, though clearly marked as a U.S. Navy ship, was struck by Israeli aircraft. After suffering damage and many personnel casualties from gunfire, rockets and bombs, she was further attacked by three Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats. One torpedo hit her on the starboard side, forward of the superstructure, opening a large hole in her hull. Thirty-four men were killed in the attacks and nearly 170 wounded.)
People have said Senator John Kerry had a connection with Jane Fonda, but, then, Senator McCain had a connection to terrorists, who called themselves our ally.
I believe that John McCain should give back nearly all of his medals…nearly all. Keep a Purple Heart, nothing more. The thing that McCain needs to do to prove his mettle and regain his honor is to speak up for the USS Liberty and those who were murdered. It’s time, way past the time, for Sen. John McCain to own up to the American people and the families of the U.S. Navy men, who where murdered and maimed by Israel.
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USS Liberty being circled by Israeli torpedo boat
The attack on the USS Cole brought a swift reply from McCain, but he said nada about the Liberty.
Another issue: Sen. McCain, sir, the war, Vietnam, is over. There is no need for you to crash any more jets, or to ask others to do so.
Sen. John McCain spent approximately 20 hours in combat. He received 28 medals. That equals around 1 ½ medals per hour. Members of my own family spent upwards of 5,000 hours each in combat, some for two tours of duty. After so many hours of fighting, jail time may have been a less torturous route. Why didn’t other soldiers get 28 medals, soldiers who didn’t get shot or shot down or didn’t come back?
The point here is that John McCain missed the vast majority of the fighting, and, as he and we know--we lost. Senator McCain needs to get over the Vietnam War and war in particular. He needs to stop filling his mind with anger. He is too fixated on war.
After watching McCain in various debates over the years, I have come to the conclusion, as have others, that McCain is pathological when it comes to anything military, but especially war. Granted, I will admit that Sen. McCain does not have the same level of psychopathic verve for war as Gen. George S. Patton had, but he has become more and more like an obsessive compulsive person arranging the details of war and making certain each segment of war is in its right place, by his marginal, biased, and un-victorious standards.
When you go back and review most of the record, the meat of McCain’s many years in the U.S. Senate, you can see that most of the meat is very lean when it came to giving substantial nourishment to the average American. It seems that the majority of time, Sen. McCain strutted about telling, telling, telling (like shelling, shelling, shelling an enemy), but not truly conversing with the American people. He often speaks as if he were a mimic of Dick Cheney, nothing coming from the heart.
What we see in McCain is a man who believes that muscle is leadership, force is intelligence, and violence is wisdom.
John McCain, as did many, fought in a war, but the saddest part is that he learned nothing about what a good soldier learns--a soldier like Gen. Eisenhower or Gen. Colin Powell. He even misrepresented President Eisenhower in the first debate of 2008, because Ike did not believe in the military industrial complex. McCain does-- with a vengeance. Eisenhower, we know, believed that information, such as that obtained from spy satellites, would lead men and nations to talk, to dialogue responsibly, to put their war toys on the table. McCain, for all of his bragging and boasting, thinks talk is cheap. He only wants information for bombing runs and target impact. But, what he truly wants is to have that BIG RED BUTTON under his angry, trembling thumb.
Instead of war, Sen. McCain, you should be demanding that America be better educated. You should demand the same high-standards that educated Saudis, Iranians, Vietnamese, and most Asian nations require. You should demand that funds pour into teaching. You should demand 21st Century educational buildings, and technology, instead of killing innocent men and women in our military, as well as in countries you are thrilled to attack or hope to attack.
As a true, honorable man, you should demand that people be healthy, so they won’t want abortions and better off so they won’t ever think about having an abortion, or getting rid of their children, or ignoring their parents and grandparents, or worrying about having to live on minimum wage, while you feast on the best “pork” in the house. You should demand a healthy citizenry with the same benefits those citizens make possible for you and the many overpaid paper-hustlers in DC.
“Double-Standard-Mc” is how you’re known in some places.
You should wonder why most people barely have one simple place to live, when you have five or six, many of which were paid for by the U.S. Government or your wife. You should be concerned that your tax breaks have caused an avalanche of horror for the people who are the backbone of our nation and for the soldiers who will be coming home to face the Bush-8-Years-of-Debt-Economic-Hardship-Revolution, which you voted for 90% of the time. It’s in the record, Senator, as is the fact of you turning you back on U.S. Navy victims.
What am I saying, Sen. McCain? I am saying, you don’t care one iota for WE the PEOPLE. You care for your memory play of war, war, war, and how it made you the angry man you are today. War, war, war is the only thing that you can blow your own horn about because you have no honest connection to WE the PEOPLE.
Why would you encourage your own daughter to write a children’s book…children’s book!...about your imprisonment? Why didn’t you encourage your daughter to write a book about all the innocent civilians and children who were killed in Vietnam and now in Iraq, as well as all the pregnant women whose babies were aborted from the bombing runs? Why? Because, it’s all about you, Senator McCain.
Not only did you turn your back, along with your father, on the USS Liberty and the soldiers in Afghanistan (that’s where the actual enemy is), you turned your back on the middle-class, the poor, and the soldiers you claim to have such a kinship with, who are coming home and finding out they are lost in America and America is lost to them.
If you were an honorable man, sir, you would look into your soul and see a man, a man who was once honorable, but who has become like the picture of Dorian Gray…used and tired and scary. You have become one of the “Ugly Americans” the writers tell us about. Your penchant for attacking others, and offering no concrete facts, will not make you honorable, it will only degrade you and your image even more. What do many people see when they look into yours eyes, Senator? The word: Treason. Ask around, you’ll find out for yourself, if…if…you desire the truth.
Sen. McCain, we all know, as you do, that you have crashed and burned, not only in Vietnam, but on the economy, on understanding the hardworking, common American, and on the need to stop giving to the rich because you think they like you. The rich do not build the roads, take out the trash, fix the messes of presidents, spend 5,000 hours in combat, and iron out the errors of men with inflated opinions and tough-guy chatter. The rich do not deserve what you lather on them. The rich do not deserve Lehman Brother salaries of $350-million and nice tax perks from you Senator, as they topple our economy and go home to their villas or one of their five homes.
You want the world to see you as honorable, but you should want God to see you as such. God is a “rich” Man, who you hardly ever mention or discuss. You only speak of God when it benefits the moment--usually, fundraising. You only speak of God…well…when, Senator, when do you speak of God?
Sen. McCain, you fought against George W. Bush in your last campaign, and he spit in your eye and rubbed your nose in it. Instead of being courageous, you scraped up the spittle, molded it into an apology and swallowed it. Then, you made certain you hugged and embraced Bush, like a long lost brother. You flipped and you flopped; you flopped and flipped, as you have done with the USS Liberty.
Carrying the memory of the USS Liberty around, like a dead albatross, would make even a much more honorable man more heartsick than you.
Sir, a hero, a true man of honor, does not glorify the effects of two illegal wars: Vietnam and Iraq. A man of honor speaks against using young lives to meet an agenda that was riddled with doubt, poor planning, no humility, no ethics, and no sense of right and wrong. You enjoy war because it’s in your blood. However, illegal, fabricated, misguided wars are the wars of evil men bent on the destruction of others to satisfy the disappoints of one’s own failed and discontented life.
What counts as victory, sir? Truth…not the acceptance of some agenda, which is packaged as truth, such as the lies of WMD and the big lie of the Gulf of Tonkin. Even the war perpetrated by former President H.W. Bush was a defeat. He pulled out, before it was over, and he abandoned many souls and tried to camouflage his defeat as victory. Winning takes special skills in a president, such as those we saw in Harry Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Winning takes character, which is sorely absent in you and many others like you.
What victory do you have, now, Sen. McCain? You have a formerly invaded and bombed to oblivion country, Vietnam, which is Communist. You engage in trade with an even greater Communist country--China. And, for a man of HONOR, you never speak out against trade with Communist countries that have real, serious military might, because too much money is going to the CEOs and companies doing business with Communists. CEOs, whom you admire.
You speak out against little bedraggled countries with no power--like Cuba--in pedantic and tiresome tones and with tough-guy political jargon. You carry a big stick to beat up tattered, weakened animals. However, when a man has lost his honor, he loses his focus and everything becomes OK, including the support of brutal, dictatorial countries--Communist countries.
You did not speak out against Israel in 1967 or after.
Sir, any duplicity a person might witness in you is understandable-- you are a politician and your 28 medals have little or no significance any longer.
If you are so committed to preventing genocide, as you stated in the first debate, why haven’t you pushed to go into Darfur? You speak glowingly of the genocide that must never occur, again, against Israel. But, for a politician, it’s understandable, the victims of Darfur have no money, they are neither conservative nor cross-over Connecticut Yankees.
Sen. John McCain with hubris at the wall: ''Say it ain't so, Joe...'' and ask Israel and McCain to own up.
Personally, before you are unable to control your anger, or you have a slip of the tongue, or Palin does (again), you just might, instead of insinuating that Sen. Obama is a Muslim, call him the N-word or a macaca.
Sen. McCain, with all due respect, it is time for you to JUST FADE AWAY. Do it for America. Do it for those who still have honor, before you wipe out even the last hope of Johnny and Joan, when they come marching home and have to face the mess that you and your favorite president have gotten us into.
Please, tell us about the USS Liberty and restore the Faith of Your Fathers.
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****OUT OF HISTORY: In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn (of the Keating Five) to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators; they were exonerated on technicalities.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than ''poor judgment….''
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** (If you don't believe it, just call the Governor's office of both states.)
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