MEANWHILE, I just got this pathetic Email from a KOS’r, asking me to help make it “Viral”
McCain’s erratic nature has been front and center this week. All the while, Obama has remained calm, cool and collected.
Salon Columnist Glenn Greenwald summarizes McCain’s behavior:
In less than 48 hours, McCain went from “I’m far too patriotic to debate unless there is a deal that is done — there’s no deal until there’s a deal” to “I’m going to debate even though there’s no deal.” Is there any way to describe that other than, as Spencer Ackerman put it, a “humiliating failure”? The New York Times’s Patrick Healy today inanely ponders whether “In a Time of Crisis, Is Obama Too Cool?” (Didn’t Rudy Giuliani become the Greatest Man Ever in History because of his post-9/11 coolness?) But surely excessive stoicism is vastly preferable to the sort of unstable, flailing panic that McCain has exhibited this week, where he issues a definitive, emphatic pledge which, less than 2 days later, is completely abandoned with little real explanation.
Meanwhile, Obama has been a steady Eddie.
High-ranking U.S. military officials have weighed in on the importance of the next Commander-in-Chief exhibiting such calm:
“I like McCain. I respect McCain. But I am a little worried by his knee-jerk response factor,” said retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004 and is now campaigning for Clinton. “I think it is a little scary. I think this guy’s first reactions are not necessarily the best reactions. I believe that he acts on impulse.”
“One of the things the senior military would like to see when they go visit the president is a kind of consistency, a kind of reliability,” explained retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former Republican, former chief of staff of the Air Force and former fighter pilot who flew 285 combat missions.
McPeak said his perception is that Obama is “not that up when he is up and not that down when he is down. He is kind of a steady Eddie. This is a very important feature,” McPeak said. On the other hand, he said, “McCain has got a reputation for being a little volatile.”
Retired Rear Adm. John Hutson, who has been a Republican his entire adult life, but who now supports Obama, put it this way about facing a national security crisis: “When everybody else goes nuts, the president of the United States needs to get cooler and cooler.”
Merrill McPeak, the worst chief of staff of the Air Force that ever came down the pike.
His words mean nothing to me.