If McCain wins….
…they’ll have to retire the “chickenhawk” meme.
Not only is McCain a bona fide war hero of unquestioned courage and true grit, but it turns out his son is a Marine fighting in Iraq.
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If Republicans are choosing a candidate based on who would fare best against and as-yet-unknown democrat counterpart, then I’m not sure McCain is a good way to go.
Twelve years ago, Bob Dole had all kinds of military credentials and the President had his “I loath the military” ROTC letter…Dole still lost. It wasn’t just because of incumbency. It had to do with our media declaring that in 1996, it was okay to tell nasty jokes about old people. As long as you stopped doing it before the holidays it was okay.
Military experience? I don’t remember a lot of people talking about it. They were told not to, or were as-good-as told not to.
What does it matter? They’ll just think up a new smear –
McCain was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese whilst a fighter pilot, correct? Then the new smear will be “Babykiller”, followed up by “How many villages did you bomb, John”?
Leftists’ only interest is power – if this involves assuming a position completely contrary to what they believed in the past, then they will.
Thus – Bill Clinton’s lack of military service “shouldn’t be an issue” when his opponent is a war hero; on the other hand, G.W. Bush’s service is all that matters when up against a decorated military officer…
All the ‘neocons’ have left the Bush admin, is that stopping anything?
Anyway, they’ll still use against non administration people with views they don’t like….
Frankly, using the “chickenhawk” meme on an ex F-102 pilot (Bush) just doesn’t “fly” with me.
In ’96, Dole was a poor candidate. He was old, his military experience largely irrelevent (as John Kerry’s was in 2004), and he had no executive experience as far as I can tell. Clinton was a bust in his first two years, but got on track by co-opting Republican legislation like welfare reform (much as LBJ did with the ’64 Civil Rights Act), so he was young, vibrant, and he was a known quantity with considerable executive experience.
Clinton’s major failing, really, is that he was more a follower (of polls, chasing popularity) than a leader. Consequently, he will have little enduring legacy.
In contrast, GW Bush may have an excellent enduring legacy if the war continues to play out well, and become a success. There is something to be said for steadfastness and staying the course, when even your friends are loosing faith.
I’ve taken part in several bloggers’ calls with Sen. McCain and never once has he brought up that his son is in the service.
In my last post I was responding to this from Roundhead:
McCain was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese whilst a fighter pilot, correct? Then the new smear will be “Babykiller”, followed up by “How many villages did you bomb, John”?
DonS:
What will all that matter? Again, leftists are only interested in power, and will say anything that will allow them to get there…
thanks
Well, I’m not sure that the facts I posted matter, but what does matter is that attempting to use something like “babbykiller” on a ‘nam vet aint likely to fly these days.
The left will use what they can, but that’s constrained by our current political reality.
Hmmm, McCain may actually out flank Giuliani — my choices are fluid; so fluid indeed that I’ll vote for Hillary before I vote for Republican Ron Paul, in a heart beat. I’ll wait and see.
In a rational world, McCain would be immunized against the chickenhawk meme, but we’re not living in that world.
Liberals rail against conservatives as “homophobic” and “haters” until a Republican (e.g., Mark Foley, Larry Craig) gets caught out, and then out come the “Republicans are faggots” remarks on left-wing blogs such as DU and HuffPo. (Speaking of which, IIRC, “chickenhawk” is homosexual slang for an older man who molests young boys, i.e., pederasts? You’d think Dems would be a bit more sensitive about offending such a core constituency.)
So I wouldn’t look for consistency from the left. If McCain gets elected and takes any military action, he’ll be characterized as a galloping militarist with anger control issues. If it’s Giuliani or Thompson, we’ll get the chickenhawk business again.
Bottom line: the left will smear any Republican, regardless of his background or what he does. In this context, Hillary’s blubbing about how the mean boys pick on her made me laugh. She got one-gazillionth of the abuse that Bush endures daily, and she comes unglued (or feigns coming unglued, I’m not sure which is worse).
McCain is my man!
I’ve been blogging the Mac all 2007. I posted today on the shake up in the GOP race after his N.H. win. One of my commenters added this:
“McCain’s chances of winning are tied directly to the speed in which he can make this a 2-man race between himself and Huckabee. To the degree that Romney and/or Giuliani stay in the race, they give disproportionate strength to Huckabee’s evangelical base. In order to win, McCain must quickly become the last anti-Huckabee candidate standing. The longer it takes him to attain this position, the better off Huckabee is.
A McCain MI win would be big because it would be a fatal blow to the Romney campaign, and would move McCain closer to a 2-man race. The two-man race scenario is also critical in terms of The Maverick’s campaign funding, which would not be diluted by other candidates.”
I hope to see you pumping the Big Mac some more!
“Then the new smear will be “Babykiller”, followed up by “How many villages did you bomb, John”?”
Nah, for the most part this is only reserved for the *really really* hard left – even the DU and DailyKOS have pretty much stomped on such things.
However we already have many different reasons as to why military people are not to be counted and McCain has all of those. McCain also graduated from the Naval academy and both his father and grandfather were Admirals in the Navy. He is obviously one of the people who is brainwashed (though I suspect they will find a different word for it) into being a hawk and will see a military solution for everything.
Not to mention that he has no real combat experience so he can still be called something of a chickenhawk (after all, he only knows what it is like to sit in the Hanoi Hilton, not what it is like having your life on the line day in and day out – I’ve seen this said for others).
Lets face it, they already have it worked out why people who are over there at this very moment have no right to say the war is the proper thing to do (especially those that specifically volunteered for that duty), why would having fought in one 30 some-odd years ago fare better? Their current ideas on that haven’t seemed to hurt them at all so, again, why would applying it to McCain be any different?
I can’t say I care for McCain a whole lot (for things like McCain-Feingold) but there is nothing but admiration for that part of his career.
my favorite speech was Giuliani’s at the republican convention after 911, and am looking forward to hearing him again the night McCain becomes the party’s nominee. i don’t much disagree with any of the previous posts tonite, but when you honestly look at McCain’s life over all, from his military and public service record, to his character and maturity in comparison with virtually every other candidate in both parties (i personally think only Giuliani comes close, but that’s something else about the nature of inescapable human imperfection), he should be the best hope we have, and best bet, at again, a critical moment in history…. if Reagan could do it, maybe McCain can now…. the problem is, of course, the numbers. for the first time that i can remember (i’m sixty), it is vividly ominous that there is an authentic manchurian candidate in contention, and people, some very high profile, who should know better, and have much at stake themselves, as well as most young, are oblivious….
From Yeat’s poem:
“A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Wow, what I just saying about Ron Paul … “Ron Paul literature ranted against blacks, gays … A series of newsletters in the name of GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul contain several racist remarks — including one that says order was restored to Los Angeles after the 1992 riots when blacks went “to pick up their welfare checks.”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/10/paul.newsletters/index.html
Let see how this pans out…
If Ron Paul is discredited, his supporters will turn back where they came from … that cozy chasm where the souls of the far right and the far left reside; ever-quizzical, parochial, isolationist hole of hatred.
Roundhead wrote:
“Leftists’ only interest is power”
And neo’conservatives’ are different how?
DonS wrote:
“GW Bush may have an excellent enduring legacy if the war continues to play out well”
What!? Bush has an “excellent” legacy? The war is going “well”? … More proof that gentile neo’conservatives’ build their ideology fundamentally on delusion..
nyomythus, that newsletter was not written by Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is by far the most patriotic man in the race of either party. Neoconservative imperialists are not patriots, as evidenced by them falling in line behind the cultural-marxist Left in shouting “racism” as a means to browbeat that anti-Imperialist heretic Ron Paul. So we can, in all fairness, call neoconservatives the cultural-marxist Right? Seems accurate enough to me.
oh lenny thinks he’s made a point if he states an insult next to every political cliche.
yawn.
lenny: did you think we needed to someone to perseverate to us?
Why don’t you guys come up with a numbering system for your cliches.. then instead of having to type “[Group X] is just as guilty of the charge you made against Leftists (even though it’s not) so therefore somehow the Left isn’t as was described” you can just type 1.4 and spare everyone the time of skimming past the words.
lenny, who can’t throw enough labels at people and then form cartoon conclusions based on those labels is now going to preach about Marxism!
Why is every Ron Paul supporter a nut?
I haven’t shouted “racism” but my suspections are strong that Paul has unhealthy allegiances with white supremest groups — I haven’t heard enough to make a reasoned decision, but, well, we’ll see. David Duke sure seem to love him.
nyomythus, David Duke and others perceive (rightly) a Federal Government very hostile to the interests of whites, so of course he would like a candidate who wants to lessen the size and power of the bloated federal Leviathan. Ron Paul himself is not David Duke and has no real racial views.
I guess the question to ask to an audience of neoconservatives in the first place is: Do whites have interests? If whites are not relevant as a group today (we are all Americans/humans/solar-system-dwellers), what exactly is the core ethnoreligious core upon which America as a nation is based? If there is no ethnoreligious base, then in what way is the U.S. a nation at all? If you are content with being a sprawling Empire ruling over a Babylonesque hodgepodge of different peoples, then I pity you.
What the heck is a “white”
My folks are from Italy since 1900 and we never consider ourselves “white”
Are you saying that because of my skin color i somehow share common cause with the Irish?
LOL… go away white trash
Ron Paul seems to be filling the same electoral niche that Lyndon LaRouche used to: the independent crank who never wins but refuses to go away.
Lenny–
The United States of America is a nation founded on the ideology of unity, rather than an “ethnoreligious core.” Hence, “melting pot,” “E pluribus unum,” “Give me you poor, your tired, your huddled masses…” &c.
Hence also “freedom of religion”–rather at odds with an “ethnoreligous core.”
Upon review, change “ideology” above to “principle.”
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true grit Says:
January 11th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
[…] If McCain wins??. […]
Truth tempered by pragmatism… an authentic and seasoned sense of character, maturity and loyalty to the principles of the republic…. just say no, to the manchurian candidate…..
It’s time for the media to stop kissing John McCain’s ass and realize that there is ANOTHER centrist, more electable candidate. His name-Rudy Giuliani. McCain was SUPPOSED to win New Hampshire! So what??! The media is doing the campaigning for McCain and it’s not right. Think McCain will compete in New York? New Jersey?? Pennsylvania?? California?? No.
personally i like rudy as much as john, but doubt he is “more electable” in the west… let’s see, something i don’t know well, the numbers….. my impression is they say the manchurian candidate is at the very least primed for v.p. with hillary, a pair unstoppable in a world of fools….
Lenny wrote: “What!? Bush has an “excellent” legacy? The war is going “well”? … More proof that gentile neo’conservatives’ build their ideology fundamentally on delusion..”
We don’t know for sure how Bush’s legacy will hold up at this point. It could turn out excellent, or not. It will be better than leftist detractors expect.
And yes, the war is once again going well.
q2600 wrote: The United States of America is a nation founded on the ideology of unity, rather than an “ethnoreligious core.” Hence, “melting pot,” “E pluribus unum,” “Give me you poor, your tired, your huddled masses…” &c.
Hence also “freedom of religion”—rather at odds with an “ethnoreligous core.”
I’d argue that the US is basically a continuation of English culture. One could say that the US is based upon Anglo-Saxon cultural values, with various changes. We are not so much a melting pot as an efficient assimilator.
I’d argue that countries such as Mexico and Brazil are much more melting pots.