After the flip this week, I advocate for John McCain as president.
Let's face it, folks. There is no doubt whatsoever that McCain has a very long history of public service. He is a bona fide war hero (okay...those of you that claim he was a traitor---prove
it). You don't spend five plus years as a tortured prisoner of war during Viet Nam, and even turn down an offer of release because fellow U.S. POWs were not also offered release, unless you are a true patriot (McCain was offfered the release after his father, Admiral John S. McCain Jr., was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Viet Nam theater--this was a propaganda move by the Viet Namese authorities, and McCain refused his release). While in the N
avy, he even served as commander of a Naval air squadron of 1,000 men following his time in Viet Nam. McCain has been in the U.S. Senate for twenty-two years, and served two terms in the House of Representatives prior to that. He is the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and serves on the Readiness, Personnel, and Seapower Subcommittees. He has been a vocal opponent of pork barrel spending and of filibustering on judicial nominations. For more on his Congressional history, see http://mccain.senate.gov/public/. For his military service history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain. He clearly has tremendous experience to bring to the presidency.
The only argument of any weight against McCain, as near as I can tell, is that he represents "more of the same" conservative, pro-war, Bush-type governing. But that's not altogether fair. He believed the Administration's reports about what the issues were in Iraq--didn't we all at first? Afterwards, while John McCain supported the troop surge of 2007, he would not have had to do so if the war had been run properly. He said from the beginning that he thought the war would be won quickly, and it really was. I don't believe he ever said that we would know how to keep the peace quickly, or that we would come home shortly after a military victory (if anyone has evidence of the contrary, please feel free to correct me on this). He expected more of the Bush Administration than he (or any of us) got. Put simply, you can win a military victory against what is essentially a third-world power quite easily, but if you don't have the proper exit strategy, you get bogged down in a never-ending defensive battle against all those who seek anarchy and disruption in your nation-building efforts. Bush never properly developed a strategy for helping the Iraq Government take over their own security, or for keeping whatever peace he thought our involvement might have afforded.
McCain has certainly agreed with President Bush on most issues, and his record reflects this. However, he has been less than complimentary on Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq. It is his very lengthy and honorable military experience, and, thus, his views on how the war should be conducted, that makes him look different from Bush. And nobody can argue that we need a different strategy than that of the great "decider." John McCain is uniquely qualified to bring about the strategic changes necessary to finally and honestly exclaim mission accomplished! To read Reed's point of view, click here.
avy, he even served as commander of a Naval air squadron of 1,000 men following his time in Viet Nam. McCain has been in the U.S. Senate for twenty-two years, and served two terms in the House of Representatives
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But McCain is a mysogymist. He hates women. Did you hear what he said to his wife? He called her a trollip and a c**t. Are you kidding me? He said that in front of reporters!
First, Dano, I'll address your comments, then I'll move on to our visitor's.
Your arguments regarding McCain's service and experience are valid, but I believe we need more than simply a "strategic" change in direction and policy. America requires a whole new direction, new leadership and new ideas, and unfortunately, the Republicans are not going to nominate the individual that can provide such.
That being said, I can only respond to Sam by saying that I think he's relying on "urban legend", which is not permitted on this blog. I can find no credible corroboration indicating that McCain made these comments. Give me the name of one of those "reporters", or let's delete this post for lack of support.
Reed, that quote from McCain appears to be accurate. It happened in 1992 on his campaign plane (I assume it was his senate seat he was campaigning to retain in 1992). It was reported by Cliff Schecter ( a longtime political reporter and network analyst who is unabashedly anti-McCain) in his book, "The Real McCain," and John McCain is said to have excused his vulgar outburst by saying, "it's been a long day."
The explanation for why it didn't get into other reporters' respective publications can be found at http://rawstory.com/news/2008/McCain_temper_boiled_over_in_92_0407.html.
Since there is some support for this quote, I don't think we can remove the comment, though Sam should have left a link as requested.
A little disappointed in what I'm reading. Dano did do his research before he wrote his blog but clearly let his Obama bias show. Reed on the other hand just regurgitated what he heard on CNN or read in the USA Today.
Let's address Reed first. This tire pressure rhetoric is exactly that. McCain is right for attacking Obama on this one. It's just a bunch of posturing by Obama. It sounds good and about 50% of the population of this country will buy in to rhetoric and clearly they have. Truth be know 80% of the cars on the road are within in decent tire pressure. At most and this according to the Government that can be gained is 3.3% in fuel mileage and at that it has to be all four tires extremely low to recover that kind of fuel mileage. At best you will recover 1% and on a 15 gallon tank that's 3 miles per tank and 59.4 cents at $4 a gallon.
I'm in the auto repair business. We check tires everyday. Very few are out of range on tire pressures.
McCain did play the political card and agreed with government reports but recognize that you can run on the rims and then put tires on the vehicles and only gain 3.3%. So no McCain doesn't disagree with the government report but he does reconize that drilling gets us out of the Gas Crunch.....not Tire Inflation. We built a navy and won a war in 41 to 45 and we are suppose to believe Obama that it would take 10 years to get oil out of new wells? If we had drilled in Anwar during the Clinton administration, we would have never had this Gas Crunch because we would be pumping that oil "10 Years" later.
As far as McCain voting with Bush, if it's the right way to vote then it's the right way to vote. It doesn't prove McCain will continue Bush's policies like some blind pig looking for an acorn as the media and Reed would have us believe.
Now to Dano. First of all I never believe anything I read on Wikipedia. It is written by any Joe Blow and they can't possibly keep up with the fact checking required for a site like that. Anybody can write whatever they want. Even Wikipedia says the information may be in error and asks for a minimum of 9 months for fact checking. On top of that the facts aren't nearly the issue as the spin you get especially on the political posts.
Dano does get it right on the war. We won the war in less than 100 days, faster than we won desert storm. It has been a police action ever since (which is what Democrats prefer by the way) but some groups love to keep calling it a "war." However, I'm not so sure he got it right accusing Bush of failed policies on the war. By what definition are the policies failed? By the liberal left media and the Democrats? Do any of you reading this know how many schools we have built there in the last 6 years? I'm not going to tell you. You do the research. The only way minds can be changed to the truth is if they do the research themselves. Dano actually spends most of his blog arguing against Bush but he is supposed to be debating for McCain. He even calls Iraq a third world country. The fifth largest army in the world is a third world country? I don't think so.
Although, I would rather see McCain than Obama, I don't know that McCain will do a better job than Bush. After all McCain was trained to fight a jungle war and the military has been training for Desert war for 30 years. I guess he is equiped to make decisions however.
Dano didn't really make a good arguement for McCain even though his research was better than Reed's. Reed on the other hand just gave us more recesitation regurgitation.
Can you imagine the position we would be in had Gore been president. I mean this guy actually believes the sky is falling. This chicken little idiot lives in a mansion, is a slum lord and wants me and you to sacrifice our lifestyles so he can afford a $1000 a month or more electric bill.
Yeah I know this wasn't about Gore but it just lead into that because of the resesitations and the poor arguements made by the bloggers.
No offense guys and I realize it's only the second week but if you want this thing to work the way you say you want it to work you have to step it up....... a lot.
Well, anonymous, I could not disagree with you more.
There is no pro-Obama bias in my post (and I challenge you to find any sentence that indicates a pro-Obama bias).
I used Wikipedia only to gather more information on McCain's history in the military. It does not matter to me whether or not the history is exactly accurate; it agrees with everything else I've ever read about McCain, and with McCain's own self-description of his military experience. What difference does it make whether Wikipedia is a "good source" when it's only being relied upon for this purpose? If you've bothered to read others of our posts, then you would recognize that we are pretty good at giving caveats when we use a questionable source when it matters.
Whether or not George Bush's policies are failures is, most accurately, a subjective determination. All I can rely upon for my own determination is the fact that, most recently, somewhere in the range of 70% of American people think his policies have failed with regard to the war (there are dozens of polls out there on Bush's performance; I will not bother to give links to them). Many of his fellow Republicans believe he has done a poor job--John McCain happens to be one of them.
In terms of my spending time arguing against Bush INSTEAD of FOR McCain, you have an interesting set of eyeglasses. I essentially expended one paragraph--the one addressing the only remotely reasonable complaint that people have against McClain--and discussed how it shouldn't apply to him. In that process, I had to contrast him to Bush, which I did. I simply used what appears to be the consensus of Americans when suggesting Bush's policies had failed.
I never said Iraq had a third-world army. Read it again. I said they are "essentially a third-world power." That refers to not only military might, but economic power, political power, international influence, and so forth. But even if I had said it was a third-world army, can you really argue that it isn't with a straight face? First of all, we all but destroyed Saddam's military in the 1993 operations, and never let him rebuild. Even YOU admit that the military victory was achieved within a few short days this go around. Do you then argue that we did this against the world's fifth most powerful military? I'm sorry, but that's just ignorant.
I'm sure Reed would get to it, but there's no such word as "resesitation," which you used twice (the second time, you spelled it "recesitation"--still not a word). Sorry, but I don't know what you mean to say, or what word you have confused this one for.
Your angry tone is obvious, and you are violating our rules in your comment (for instance, we specifically prohibit name-calling, and you call Al Gore a "chicken little idiot). Moreover, Al Gore doesn't have anything to do with our subject this week. If you care to comment in the future, please follow the site guidelines.
Having said all this, thanks for participating in our "thing that doesn't work."
I've a couple of comments and a topic suggestion.
First, I found the comments by "Anonymous" to be vitriolic.
Secondly, for what it's worth, I think both Dano and Reed are doing an excellent job in their debates.
Lastly, I'd love to see a debate on whether the media and/or video games are responsible for the moral decline (possibly subjective?) of society.
Keep up the good work, guys!
Unfortunately Dano you had to argue for a man whose own professional, paid staff have a hard time doing the same. If this campaign is about experience vs. change, and McCain's experience is what you used as a majority of your arguement, then McCain is doomed. Of course, what should I expect, that's what McCain's own paid staff is holding up as his advantage. Foolish of them. People are generally tired of Washington.
Ask any person on the street and you'll hear most of them say they opppose Bush -- all but the party hardliners. But MORE people are upset with Congress than with Bush. Click here for citation
And look who we've got running for the presidency, two Congressmen. Sounds like the people are going to be upset no matter who wins. To say you have experience in Washington is a bad arguement.
McCain is not even going to get the BASE of his party out to vote for him. The NeoCon wing of the conservative party cut McCain's legs out from under him 8 years ago in favor of Bush. Now the NeoCons have accepted McCain (perhaps because they know they have no chance of winning this year anyway). But McCain's constant verbage against pork barrel spending is just that verbage. If you researched McCain's vote record at www.votesmart.org (and it takes work because you've got to find out the name of pork-laced bills, do some strange searches because some of the most important votes were amendments and may not show up, so you have to search via votes such as 66-32), anyway, research his vote record on these bills he railed against. You'll find he may have spent an hour blasting these pork barrel bills on the floor of the senate, but couldn't be bother to actually show up and vote against them. That's IF he didn't vote FOR them.
No politician wants to be seen to vote against flooded hurricane victims, collapsed bridges, or ophaned children -- and that's why pork barrel spending works. Call it the Hurricane Relief Bill for Children Orphaned Because Their Parents Fell To Their Death on a Collapsed Bridge bill and you can fund ANYTHING with that. Poor McCain. Poor us.
Deb...Thanks for the kind words and for the debate idea! We'll put the media/video games debate into the idea hat. Did you see harkleroad's suggestions under the "Toilet Paper Debate" Not Worthy" post? Several good ideas, there, too.
Geeesh...I did it again. I misspelled McCain in the 5th paragraph of my response to "Anonymous." I don't know why I have such a hard time spelling such an easy name. Interestingly, I also routinely put "johns" into search fields when looking up people named "John" (understandable, really...it's my last name), and frequently catch myself adding an "e" to the end of the word "court" (no explanation for that one, my fingers just automatically do it).
j.t., If and when I ever get the time to do a search on McCain's voting record, I'll look into the pork barrel spending position, but I find what you're suggesting to be one of the most tedious kinds of research--for the reasons you mentioned. All I can say now is that he is frequently said to be a hawk against pork barrel spending (by Repubs and Dems alike), and your comment is the first I've heard that disputes his reputation on the issue. That doesn't mean there isn't contention on the issue, just that I've not heard it. And, BTW, your citation link (on people being less satisfied with Congress than Bush)doesn't work, but that's okay; I'm aware of the polls on these issues.
Yes, people are angry with Congress' lack of production. But there is still a lot of partisan roadblocking going on, despite (or maybe because of) a very narrow Dem majority in the House and an even Senate (the two Independents and Republican VP don't really give a majority to either party). This will likely change somewhat after the elections in November; the direction of change remains to be seen--I have my suspicions, though,that Republicans will lose considerably more seats.
J.T., I find your comments about the public's contempt of Congress very interesting. And you're correct as far as the polls show. But polls are only as good as the questions they ask. And the fascinating thing is that, while historically the public has always held Congress as a voting representative body in contempt, they almost always support their own elected representatives. It's the old, "He may be a scoundrel, but he's my scoundrel" attitude.
It's the explanation why incumbents under indictment or investigation often get reelected.
Another issue I have here is that the complaints about Congress often don't take into consideration that there are two distinct bodies of Congress with different priorities and much different rules. We may one day choose to argue whether the founders were correct in setting it up as such, but people who say that "Democrats won both houses in 2006 and haven't been able to accomplish anything" often don't realize that, unlike the House, where "majority rules", the Senate requires 60 votes just to shut off debate on an issue. The Democrats don't have 60, yet, so they must rely on compromise to get a vote through. It's why Obama now says he would accept Congress' overturning the ban on offshore drilling if it was part of a comprehensive, conservation-based energy program.
Education, education, education - our nation, now more than ever, requires an educated voting public. Unfortunately, we don't seem to making much progress in that regard.
dano and reed, given the group of Elephants and Donkeys we have in Congress right now, the only thing I'm upset about is that they HAVE managed to pass legislation in the last 8 years.
j.t....touche!
Dano and Reed, you guys might want to add a link to the following web page to your front page. http://www.electoral-vote.com
I noticed a new national poll came out today. I get so sick of those because they don't mean anything in regards to who is likely to be the next president. This site tracks state polling information and adjusts them based on sources (such as did a Dem or Rep organization do the poll) and based on plus/minus error. It seems a much more accurate site for tracking the horse race than these national polls.
Good idea, j.t.--thanks.
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