Posted on 01/23/2008 9:18:45 PM PST by PhilDragoo
There is a scene in the classic Elia Kazan film Viva Zapata when a young Emiliano Zapata for the first time meets his bride-to-bes father, a shopkeeper manifestly unimpressed with his daughters suitor. The father calls Zapata a man of substance, without substance.
So, too, it is with John McCain. He is a man of integrity without integritymeaning that the senator is reputed to have great integrity, but in fact has little, given the definition of that word: the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards (Encarta Dictionary).
Two different, but related, events that coalesced today are what have caused me to write on this subject.
The first was an email from a friend observing that a noted Washington, D.C. conservative journalist just said to her that he disagreed with what McCain was saying, but nonetheless considered McCain far and above the best [presidential] candidate because the man has integrity.
The second was this weeks Newsweek Web Exclusive by Jonathan Alter, relating a telephone call he had just received from Ross Perot, the unsuccessful presidential candidate who has long been a major voice on behalf of POWs and MIAs. Alter quoted Perot as saying that McCain is the classic opportunisthes always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs wont even sit at the same table with him.
According to Alter, Perots real problem with McCain is that he believes that the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. Theres evidence, evidence, evidence, Perot claims. McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.
Perot was referring principally to McCains tag-team performance with John Kerry on a Senate committee charged with getting to the bottom of the MIA question. (See the article Archangel 1918 to Hanoi 1972)
That article series and the copious sources cited in it leave no doubt that McCain was instrumental in burying, sadly for all time, any possibility of learning what became of Americans who were missing in action throughout Southeast Asia. Hardly the work of a man of integrity, let alone a United States Senator and himself a former prisoner of war.
While McCains lack of integrity in the MIA investigation is so dramatic because of his own military and POW background, there are other examples which are equally important and disturbing.
The man of integrity and self-proclaimed fighter for the little guy was up to his ears in the infamous Keating Five bank scandal, which cost countless American bank depositors incalculable amounts of money and some of them their life savings.
The man of integrity, a Republican and alleged conservative, partnered with leftwing Democrat Senator Russ Feingold to sponsor and enact a federal statute that has throttled considerable free political speech in American election campaigns, because, according to McCain himself he would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, Id rather have the clean government.
The man of integrity did his best to legitimize millions of illegal aliens, despite their criminality, their harmful effect on the American economy, and its workers.
The man of integrity, during his two-plus decades in Congress, and his political heft there, did little or nothing on behalf of veterans, despite the fact that few in that body knew better than he the personal costs of their service and their needs.
The man of integrity, who supposedly opposes the living Constitution principle, organized the Senate cabal euphemistically known as the Gang of Fourteen, which made him kingmaker and indispensable to the White House in its nomination of Supreme Court justices and other federal judgesthereby, in a single coup, weakening the Presidents appointment power and enabling the Senate to filibuster in violation of its constitutional duty to give judicial nominees up or down votes.
The man of integrity, a Navy pilot who spent over five years as a POW, whitewashed antiwar poster-girl Hanoi Jane Fonda, whom he characterized as merely a confused young actressthereby insulting many of his POW brothers and others who suffered from her conduct, further legitimizing her traitorous behavior on behalf of the Communists.
The man of integrity, with a reputation for being strong on national security, engineered a near-unanimous Senate vote to give enemy combatants (i.e., Islamic terrorists) all the protections the Geneva Convention reserves for prisoners of war, and to prohibit the obtaining of crucially important intelligence by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
The man of integrity, who rails against government waste and purports to believe in a strong economy, twice broke ranks with his party, and voted against the Bush tax cuts. And against repeal of the death tax.
The man of integrity, who so prides himself on being a maverick individualist, admits to being a collectivist by such statements as Each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our [own] self-interest.
The man of integrity, claiming concern with Americas dependency on foreign oil and the wealth transfer that it causes, joined the left no fewer than four times in defeating our ability to drill in Alaska.
The man of integrity joined with socialist [hawk] Senator Joseph Lieberman to promote an energy tax to combat global warming, even though it would help the oil cartel and, worse, be aimed at a spurious threat that lacks credible scientific basis.
Now McCain has become the potential Republican presidential nominee.
So the time has come to make an explicit issue of his purported integrityan accolade deriving mostly from his reputation for straight talk (which has nothing per se to do with integrity), and his having been a prisoner of war.
Having been a POWwhich McCain has recently been reminding voters about, especially in South Carolinano more qualifies, let alone entitles, John McCain to be President of the United States than it does any other former POW.
Nor is it possible to extrapolate from McCains POW experience all of the qualities a conservative president must possess in these times of deadly threats from abroad and a semi-socialist domestic economy brought us by the Republicansand inevitable under the Democrats.
Nor does having suffered the agonies of Communist captivity give John McCain, or anyone else, a license to act consistently in a manner inimical to the interests of the United States of America and its people. It does not elevate a political opportunist and a man who lacks integrity into a presidential candidate who possesses that quality. Suffering is not a substitute for possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles.
Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a constitutional and appellate lawyer. His most recent book 'The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas (1991-2006)' has just been published. He maintains a website at www.henrymarkholzer.com
"This is Jane Fonda speaking from Hanoi. Yesterday evening, July 19, I had the opportunity of meeting seven U.S. pilots. Some of them were shot down as long ago as 1968 and some of them had been shot down very recently. they are all in good health. We had a very long talk, a very open and casual talk. We exchanged ideas freely. They asked me to bring back to the American people their sense of disgust of the war and their shame for what they have been asked to do."
Aid and Comfort contains twenty-four (24) pages of such broadcasts by Jane Fonda recorded in Hanoi with the sole intent of providing the enemy with aid and comfort in time of war.
John McCain has damaged freedom of speech in the heart of the Free World in a way Stalin and Mao and Ho only dreamed of doing.
The War Secrets Sen. John McCain Hides
But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about -- his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.
Also see:
Vietnam Veterans Against John
http://vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/
Excellent, outstanding post Phil!!
I am impressed even though I am well aware you are a very good writer!
Kudos and good information.
I think McCain's body language is very telling. I have NEVER, that I recall, seen his poor wife walking in front of him. She is always behind him and he rarely acknowledges her presence. I think he is extremely sel-fcentered--and has always been.
I would almost vote for Hillary before him because I dislike him almost as much as I dislike her and I don't trust either of them
Confrontation with witnessOne such witness was Dolores Apodaca Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families, an all-volunteer MIA organization. Her pilot brother, Capt. Victor J. Apodaca, out of the Air Force Academy, was shot down over Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, in the early evening of June 8, 1967. At least one person in the two-man plane survived. Beeper signals from a pilot's distress radio were picked up by overhead helicopters, but the cloud cover was too heavy to go in. Hanoi has recently turned over some bone fragments that are supposed to be Apodaca's. The Pentagon first declared the fragments to be animal bones. But now it is telling the family -- verbally -- that they came from the pilot. But the Pentagon, for unexplained reasons, will not put this in writing, which means Apodaca is still unaccounted for. Also the Pentagon refuses to give Alfond a sample of the fragments so she can have testing done by an independent laboratory.
Alfond's testimony, at a hearing of the POW/MIA committee Nov. 11, 1992, was revealing. She pleaded with the committee not to shut down in two months, as scheduled, because so much of its work was unfinished. Also, she was critical of the committee, and in particular Kerry and McCain, for having "discredited the overhead satellite symbol pictures, arguing there is no way to be sure that the [distress] symbols were made by U.S. POWs." She also criticized them for similarly discounting data from special sensors, shaped like a large spike with an electronic pod and an antenna, that were airdropped to stick in the ground along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
These devices served as motion detectors, picking up passing convoys and other military movements, but they also had rescue capabilities. Specifically, someone on the ground -- a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor detail -- could manually enter data into the sensor pods. Alfond said the data from the sensor spikes, which was regularly gathered by Air Force jets flying overhead, had showed that a person or persons on the ground had manually entered into the sensors -- as U.S. pilots had been trained to do -- "no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos."
Other than the panel's second co-chairman, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., not a single committee member attended this public hearing. But McCain, having been advised of Alfond's testimony, suddenly rushed into the room to confront her. His face angry and his voice very loud, he accused her of making "allegations ... that are patently and totally false and deceptive." Making a fist, he shook his index finger at her and said she had insulted an emissary to Vietnam sent by President Bush. He said she had insulted other MIA families with her remarks. And then he said, through clenched teeth: "And I am sick and tired of you insulting mine and other people's [patriotism] who happen to have different views than yours."
Brought to tears
By this time, tears were running down Alfond's cheeks. She reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. She tried to speak: "The family members have been waiting for years -- years! And now you're shutting down." He kept interrupting her. She tried to say, through tears, that she had issued no insults. He kept talking over her words. He said she was accusing him and others of "some conspiracy without proof, and some cover-up." She said she was merely seeking "some answers. That is what I am asking." He ripped into her for using the word "fiasco." She replied: "The fiasco was the people that stepped out and said we have written the end, the final chapter to Vietnam." "No one said that," he shouted. "No one said what you are saying they said, Ms. Alfond." And then, his face flaming pink, he stalked out of the room, to shouts of disfavor from members of the audience.
This man has his demons--and continues to make them ours. Communism is diabolical--but antithetical to the American Ideal.
McCain has committed a vile act in his burning zeal to destroy the First Amendment--for of course it is the foundation of our liberty.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve intended to put together my own list of grief, but haven’t had the time to collect all the information much less sit down and organize it all and type it up.
I printed this one out for my wife to take to work where she has ongoing discussions with McCain supporters whom really don’t know any of this. They are confused about her animosity towards McCain the War Hero.
Hopefully they will understand with this information under their noses. Thanks again for the post.
If you do a Goggle search using this group of words, youll get more than you want to read. Maybe add in 1998 and 2001
1999 2000 POW MIA site:www.freerepublic.com
McCain/Kerry F the POWS/MIAS
McCain/Feingold F free speech
McCain/Kennedy F American Sovereignty
McCain/Gang of 14
McCain/Keating 5
McCain/Terrorist Bill of Rights
McCain/Gun Grabber
McCain/Does not like tax cuts
More?
I’m for breaking into that mausoleum and propping up what’s left of Theodore Roosevelt at a podium. I’d vote for his remains over the live candidates remaining in the race.
Think about it - his reticence and inertness would probably be the wisest course of action any President took in the last twenty years.
TR/Thompson in ‘08!
I last voted democratic for Jimmy Carter, But if McCain becomes nominee of the party I will vote Democrat because McCain has hurt the conservative movement more than any other Republican. Can you image what liberals ideas would become law if he became president? At least Hillary would have the Republicans in congress fighting her and not making McCain legislation go though which could kill the conservative movement for decades.
Im a radical conservative but if McCain wins say goodbye to the Conservative movement for decades. Plus the politicians who back that phony would increase.
Duncan Hunter endorsed Huckabee today!!
Thanks, Phil. That is all posted on my profile page now if you want to link to that. I was told to stop “spamming” threads with it.
John McCain has damaged freedom of speech in the heart of the Free World in a way Stalin and Mao and Ho only dreamed of doing.Absolutely! McCain will NOT do this country any good. McCain is the ONLY one on the GOP list of candidates that is NOT on MY long list to support.
The MEDIA loves his sorry arse, dang them !!
I was so very sorry to hear of Fred Thompson's pullout but hold out great hope for a Romney-Thompson ticket !!!
ping to more on McCain.
What the ... ???
Well... puke !!
Perfect !!
Excellent graphics facts, my dear !! Thanks!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.