2008 Primaries Thread 3: The Rejecting and Denouncening

"Most of the blue-collar folks that knew they needed a president were for (Kennedy), and most of the university students who wanted a feeling for change were for McCarthy, and they thought he had a purer position on the Vietnam War."

guys this is kind of an interesting point

i suppose the key difference is that nixon was rolling into the tail end of a painful dem presidency whereas mccain is rolling into the tail end of a painful repub presidency?

i dunno. when you put wright and the flag pin and michelle o's comments all in a line , and then put that next to DECORATED WAR HERO JOHN MCCAIN, i think maybe a lot of middle americans might have o doubts?

maybe i'm getting em too. gah.

It's too early to predict whether a slowly disintegrating Iraq and the economy will influence voting patterns. Chances are the Silent Majority don't give a fuck about the declassified John Yoo memos.

hoos, that's like the third time this month i've seen you give mccain props, wtf

i dunno man he's just...one of my biggest criticisms of bushco has been that they're sending dudes off to fight in war, and they've spent their whole careers behind desks avoiding wars. mccain at least has been in conflict and would think a helluva lot harder about sending kids with guns somewhere.

Look there's no doubt that hoos's formulation will be the case for SOME Americans, even A LOT of Americans. The question is just how many.

He would think a lot harder and come up with the answer that "Regretfully, my friends, we must start sending our kids with guns somewhere."

xpost

yeah if every american has hoos' thought process (god forbid), we're fucked. i mean, no offense hoos.

though you're probably just playing devil's advocate

"Regretfully, my friends, we must lower taxes on capital gains and further gut the social safety net."

mccain at least has been in conflict and would think a helluva lot harder about sending kids with guns somewhere.

you might think so, but you would be wrong. McCain family obviously completely bound up in pathological psychology of being a military family (daddy issues, sacrifice, etc.) and as such has no compunction about starting more wars. bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb iran indeed.

flag pin

like, really?

isnt anyone else interested in the relationship btw. a president's military service and his use of military force? obv im not a mccain supporter but hoos's point isnt a stupid one--surely a president who's served in the armed forces has a better indication of what it would mean to deploy the military?

draft like the weatherman

isnt anyone else interested in the relationship btw. a president's military service and his use of military force?

Most of our presidents who were ranked generals were wary of war: Washington, Grant, Eisenhower.

lol @ big hoos rejecting obama

http://www.impawards.com/2000/posters/whipped.jpg

That's why I tend to admire Eisenhower more than the other Cold War presidents. Despite mischief in Guatemala and feeling every pressure to continue Truman's heinous legacy, he balked at expanding American military domination.

btw I can't look at McCain in the eye anymore, but I think this "bomb bomb bomb Iran" line is melarkey uttered to placate the right wing. As I suggested on the other thread(s), it's not the first time a candidate "sends signals" only to reverse himself as president.

Had he been the nominee and won in 2000, McCain may have invaded Iraq, but even with Lieberman playing Iago I doubt we would have been subjected to the likes of Ashcroft, John Bolton, Feith, Rumsfeld, et al.

though you're probably just playing devil's advocate

-- omar little, Thursday, April 3, 2008 11:19 PM

i mean i'm not coming out in support of CAPTAIN MCCAIN (or whatever rank he was), i'm saying maybe w/o all those comparisons weighing her down maybe hil is the one to beat him?

man i feel like daria all of a sudden

Most of our presidents who were ranked generals were wary of war: Washington, Grant, Eisenhower

uh, McCain's not a general (also where's Andrew Jackson, on yr list). Plenty of other military serving presidents (Nixon, Johnson, Bush I) were all too happy to have stupid wars costing thousands of lives.

LOL HOOS IS A LESBIAN

way to stay the course and not listen to the talking heads, hoos

uh, McCain's not a general (also where's Andrew Jackson, on yr list)

Shakey, unless you're making a gotcha moment, you know from my original comments that I never said McCain was a general. The question was about "military service."

and, as I've said elsewhere, I'm well aware of Jackson's resume -- that's why I said "most."

my point is just that there's a lot more to military service than being a General - the list of presidents who were generals is really short; the list of presidents who served in the military is pretty long. As such, there isn't really much of a correlation between presidents serving in the military and being dove-ish in the oval office, which seemed to be what you were implying...?

whatevs, its all good

way to stay the course and not listen to the talking heads, hoos

-- omar little, Thursday, April 3, 2008 11:54 PM

http://xs226.xs.to/xs226/08145/fearof205.jpg

^ http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/style_emoticons/default/applause.gif

too many of those pageloads are me, I'm part of the problem :(

THANKS FOR MAKING MARCH '08 THE BIGGEST MONTH IN THE DRUDGEREPORT'S 13 YEAR HISTORY!

MAIN PAGE LOADED 590,943,577 TIMES... TOPS MARCH 2007'S 425,371,511... TOPS MARCH 2006'S 287,443,312 ... MANY THANKS FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT... THE LOVERS AND THE HATERS... AND NEWS ENTHUSIASTS IN OVER 100 COUNTRIES!

I think this "bomb bomb bomb Iran" line is melarkey uttered to placate the right wing

as with so much else on this thread (some of it from me), that overrates the candidate's wiles by a fair piece, he was just saying stupid shit without thinking -- in this case it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his joke (and i wonder where he heard it from) DOES reveal something about him, but what it reveals may just be that he's got the kind of doomed yet macho gallows humor that so many soldiers in vietnam developed -- what it also reveals though is that he's got a really bad radar for when to deploy it, and this sort of thing may be what undoes him in the end (on top of inheriting the most disastrous republican presidency in modern history; all his actual positions; "your choice: bush iii or obama" etc)

either way, it's melarkey.

Here we go:

http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/040308DailyUpdateGraph1Amsdprows.gif

its a fucking waltz

For all the font nerds out there:

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/to-the-letter-born/?em&ex=1207368000&en=5516695deb8e76df&ei=5087%0A

take it in kids...

http://www.luckypennyproductions.net/hillary/bitch.jpg

people don't understand, i mean it as a term of endearment

ok enough of that already

some real butthurtedness going on in the comments

Re: McCain's military background and its impact on his view on/willingness to conduct war:

There was a Newsweek article a couple of years ago (or maybe last year) about McCain's relationship with Hagel. It pointed out how their different experiences of the Vietnam War (Hagel on the ground, shooting people and getting shot at; McCain bombing from above) may have colored their attitudes toward the Iraq War. Taking McCain's POW experience into account, he was never in the position to kill someone up close or watch people being killed around him.

I'm sure that article is findable on the Web somewhere.

Style equals accuracy. Put the word “change” in Comic Sans and the idea feels lightweight and silly.

lol isn't Comic Sans like universally considered the worst font in the world? Not a great example.

Here it is

Key grafs ("Tom" is Hagel's brother):

The two men saw the war from sharply different angles. Chuck Hagel "walked point" with an infantry company near the Cambodian border in some of the worst fighting in 1967 and '68. His brother Tom often went on patrol with him (the brothers circumvented an Army rule that bars family members from serving in combat together). "I don't know how many times we would be assigned to go out for a search-and-destroy mission," Tom recalls, "and we'd pass South Vietnamese villages with South Vietnamese soldiers lying around sleeping in hammocks. They're doing easy duty while we were out doing the hard part." The lesson to the Hagel brothers was obvious: "You cannot win somebody else's independence," says Tom. "They have to do it for themselves."

Ground-pounder Tom says that while he respects McCain's service, the bomber pilot could not have known what reality was like down in the jungle: "He was up in the air at 10,000 feet. He never saw the consequences of those bombs." (Tom is a Democrat who's tussled with his brother on partisan politics.) McCain acknowledges that different perspectives can produce different outlooks on the war. He brings up one of Hagel and McCain's mutual friends, Gen. Colin Powell, whose Vietnam service bred a strong reluctance to intervene in a foreign conflict without overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy--the so-called Powell Doctrine. "One of the most impactful experiences of Colin's life was holding a dying soldier in his arms in the battlefield in Vietnam," says McCain. "I can see how that would have a very significant impression on him."

http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/040408DailyUpdateGraph1_mnbvert.gif

huzzah

when the right wing comment trolls call him juan or captain amnesty it's yet another window into GOP-base racism. a distant third in the nickname stakes is "McVain", and there i think they really have his number. the guy views every single policy issue through the lens of personal honor and heroism. it explains his lurching around the ideological landscape on this or that issue, while being totally clueless about important systemic things. it's not that he has conservative opinions on economics or education or health care, he doesn't have much of an opinion at all. nothing in those problems has much in the way of a 'noble struggle on to victory' narrative, so he doesn't really give a shit. and in terms of the war his attitude is even more mindless than the bush doctrine itself.

otm

so i guess today, mccain gives a speech apologizing for his initial opposition to an MLK holiday -- while a black guy holds his umbrella for him. unsurprisingly, mccain is booed.

that is totally right about mccain! thanks, gff, i've never seen it articulated so clearly.

omg elmo

http://bp1.blogger.com/_ndAyv4BjPbk/R_WNoVLpe_I/AAAAAAAAARU/6dalIDAqQCE/s1600-h/Picture+5.png

http://bp3.blogger.com/_ndAyv4BjPbk/R_WNX1Lpe-I/AAAAAAAAARM/Sq1_Jzw2gi0/s1600-h/Picture+6.png

(indirect source)