Posted on 05/14/2008 5:34:20 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
In the New York Times’ upcoming edition of their Sunday magazine, they take a look at John McCain’s divergent views of the Iraq War from those of his fellow Vietnam veterans. In The McCain Doctrines, Matt Bai reports that most of these colleagues (with the noted exception of Bob Kerrey) attribute McCain’s support for Iraq to the fact that he didn’t serve on the ground in Vietnam — and that his years as a POW somehow “sealed” him away from the war’s lessons:
There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Another NY Times hit piece imho.
That sounds like a serious stretch to me.
Early warning radar has picked up enemy planes approaching from the far left, man your battle stations
THEY have GOT to be KIDDING.....they’re delusional ....
I much prefer “an inside view few others had”.
“Early warning radar has picked up enemy planes approaching from the far left, man your battle stations”
John McCain is going to wake up and realize his buddies in the MSM are going to be hitting him like Kamakazi’s. But that will be OK as long as they don’t go after Obama and offend him.
The Drive-By Media always likes to portrait veterans-turned-Leftist as the norm.
You’re telling me.. I’ve heard some pretty pathetic attempts at making McCain’s war record a liability, but this takes the cake.
Also, I’d be interested to see a poll of Vietnam vets to see what percentage of them agree with Webb, Kerry, and Hagel on what the “lessons” of Vietnam were. Of course, those three are the only important ones, because their version of the “lesson” of Vietnam is the media-approved one.
In the not too distant future, the NYT’s will be listing garage sales and lost pets exclusively. Their day is done and gone.
The NYT fails once again. I cannot stand McCain as our candidate....but this is a tad to absurd to the point of laughable.
I supposed it is supposed to somehow connect Juan to Bush and present an idea that McCain was one of the lucky, privileged, and out of touch while imprisoned in Hanoi.
Hope the NYT can do better than this. So far, they have made bigger fools out of themselves than ever before.
Lord have mercy.
Is there no depths the liberal media will not go to discredit John McCain’s service to his country? All this because Barack Hussein Obama can not win the general election.
Wow. That’s pretty amazing. I never even thought of this spin to try and discredit McCain’s military record and experience.
I think the only lesson of Viet Nam was that we didn’t stay long enough to finish the job. AND not to listen to the lamestream media, although they didn’t have any other choice then.
The Vietnam War opposition movement was led by Communists who WANTED the North Vietnamese Communists to Win over South Vietnam. It was not led by “disillusioned” soldiers who asked “what are we fighting for”.
Hanoi Jane, Jerry Rubin, et al were proud of their associations with Communist leaders. Jane Fonda said we’d all want to live under Communism if we only understood what it was.
The Vietnam antiwar movement was outright treason against the United States engaged in an active war. Siding with the enemy in word and in deed. Undercutting our elected government’s policies, meeting with the enemy, and in the case of Kerry’s group, targeting the assassination of elected members of Congress.
Who was it recently, Sen. Rockefeller of WV, who claimed McCain didn’t understand war, he just dropped his laser-guided bombs from 30,000 feet and flew away?
This is a bizarre correlation
Dude, seriously, does the NYTimes do anything other than hit pieces on Republicans? I mean it's like wild-eyed fanaticism with them.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have had Laser guided bombs in Nam? If we did, calling an close in airstrike wouldn’t have been a high pucker factor affair, especially with Naphalm.
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