The always-classy Democrats
Sister Toldjah has the story, via Ed Morrissey, of the subtle digs our friends in the mainstream media are making concerning Senator John McCain’s service in Vietnam. Sis quotes The New York Times::
There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans [in the Senate] that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.
Emphasis mine.
In 1992 and 1996, when the Democrats were running a draft-dodger, the service, the very distinguished service, of two genuine combat veterans ~ one of whom was still handicapped by wounds received in combat ~ was pooh-poohed as unimportant. In 2000 and 2004, the Vietnam war service of the Democratic nominees was trumpeted as being just so much braver and better than that of George W Bush, who served in the Air National Guard.
Now, we’re going to have a Republican nominee who spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war, a man tortured and beaten by the Communist Vietnamese, and here it comes again; his service, while honorable, well, maybe it wasn’t all that important. After all, his experience wasn’t that of the other Vietnam veterans in the Senate, as the line I boldfaced above indicates:
During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle.
No, I guess not: Lieutenant Commander McCain had no problem in recognizing the enemy when he was in Vietnam, because they quite readily made themselves known to him, introduced themselves every stinking day with fists and rifle butts and a few other choice pieces of identification.
I wonder if that is why Senator McCain so strongly supports our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has no doubts as to whom the enemy are. He isn’t infected with the long-distance Stockholm Syndrome of so many of our friends on the left, who want to understand the poor, unfortunate people who oppose us, who have some vague ~ or not so vague ~ feelings of sympathy for the downtrodden of the earth.
Mr Morrissey:
- Now we have at least three Democrats and Obama supporters on the record as attacking McCain’s 24 years of service in the Navy: Gillespie, Jay Rockefeller, and Tom Harkin, as well as unnamed “colleagues†in the Matt Bai hit piece in the New York Times. The criticisms sound remarkably similar; all of them question the quality of his service, claiming that he grew up as a child of privilege and had his career handed to him, in a role where he didn’t know what combat was really like. He had a “silver spoonâ€, was “Navy royaltyâ€, and so on.
Mr McCain did have his career handed to him, in a way: he was the son and grandson of admirals, which certainly didn’t hurt in gaining admission to the United States Naval Academy. And one of his sons is a Midshipman at Annapolis, as well.
But it’s kind of difficult to picture the food served to him by the Vietnamese as royal fare, nor the gentlemen who brought him his food as liveried servants.
What isn’t difficult to picture, however, is the low-class of the people who are denigrating his service. Count on seeing more of this before November.
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