Why is this story worth repeating? The Cinderella quality of such imaginings provides a telling context – revealing the man and his presumptions hiding behind the mask of war hero. In this election season, understanding the full context of presumptions is very important. My husband, also a former Vietnam Prisoner of War (1970-1973), spent time in both the "Hanoi Hilton" and a secondary camp -"Plantation Gardens" - as did John McCain who never mentions time spent in the latter...

If Mr. McCain is now intent on running on his character and his war record almost - because he has nothing else to offer - while suggesting that others do not care about their country as much as he does - then the wife and daughter of two other Vietnam heroes has a few questions for him: In the interest of full disclosure why do you refuse to release your Department of Defense POW debriefing? In the interest of full disclosure why have you failed to release all military medical records including psychological studies? When will you provide details about the time spent in the prison referred to as “Plantation Gardens"? Did you ever receive any preferential or atypical treatment while a POW in any location where you were held? How soon and when did you reveal your true identity to your Vietnamese captors - did you simply give name, rank and serial number? [More] . . read more

At the Victory Column in Berlin's Tiergarten, Obama extracted Old Glory from the burn-pile and gave Brand America a desperately needed shot of adrenaline. 200,000 ecstatic Germans jammed the streets in what turned out to be the political shindig of the year. Many of them were waving American flags and chanting, "Obama, Obama, Obama". It was like Jack Kennedy had risen from his moldy sepulcher and made his way across the pond for one last rousing ovation. Obama has the very same affect on crowds. Its a gift and he knows how to use it to great advantage...

What can we say about Obama's oratory skills that hasn't already been said? He is one of those unique characters who knows how to tap into the collective psyche and put them under his spell. He is the closest thing to a Pied Piper we've seen in the last half century. Whatever one thinks of his politics, his speeches are a welcome reprieve from the simian blabbering of President Dimwit. [More] . . read more

A depressingly large number of Americans... across the land from Maine to California, fall into this willfully stupid category. They are content to get their information from television programs that offer no facts — just propaganda and ratings-boosting rants. They don’t read newspapers. They reject facts that conflict with their prejudices. They’ll believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. They’ll believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They’ll believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago. They’ll believe the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio.

Certainly one cohort of voters that is keeping the leaky Clinton dirigible airborne is women, particularly older women, for whom her candidacy is a feminist milestone. That is understandable. But the other cohort, which Clinton has referred to as “hard working, white Americans” and as “whites who had not completed college,” is hardly something she or any candidate should be bragging about. And yet that is what she is doing: bragging that she’s got a lock on the stupid, racist white vote. She should be leaving that for John McCain. [More] . . read more

Both are now in poor political shape, with contradictory strategies for rehabbing their fortunes. The president is saddled with an approval rating bumping along in the 20s. Each day he is served another platter of contemptuous stories about “the worst presidency of modern times”, the lack of any enduring “legacy”, the approaching Democratic landslide that will put the Republicans in the wilderness for at least two terms...

The White House made no serious attempt to upend Obama’s trip to Iraq or excessively ridicule the harmonies from the Democratic candidate and Iraqi prime minister Maliki on schedules for U.S. withdrawal. Indeed noises that could be construed as acceptance of an accelerated schedule emanated from the White House... As final testimony to the huge disaster for the McCain campaign of Obama’s trip to Iraq, the floundering Republican candidate managed to shoehorn himself into talk about a rate of withdrawal from Iraq a good deal brisker than the 100 years of occupation he was talking about, or even the 2013 deadline he subsequently settled on. [More] . . read more

What do Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain have to say about our current reality of financial crisis and recession, and the generation-long stagnation in average living standards that has preceded the crisis of the moment? There aren't significant distinctions between Obama and Clinton in terms of their campaign platforms, while both Democratic contenders share huge differences with McCain. But the most important question is not where these candidates stand during the campaign; it's what they would actually do while in office. And this is more a matter of political power - which social groups can exert pressure within a new administration - than of economic philosophy...

A new Democratic administration may well offer possibilities for a dramatic shift in U.S. economic policy, even if some of the same old Bill Clinton crowd is brought back in as advisors. But if such a major policy shift does occur, it will not be primarily because a Democrat-either Hillary Clinton or Obama-will be sitting in the White House. It will rather be because the people who put one of them there will have gathered sufficient political strength to make them stick to their campaign promises. [More] . . read more

Senator John McCain is a poster boy for the pathologies of the military brat. Born in the Panama Canal Zone, he attended twenty schools in his nomadic childhood. "The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi," is how he shuts up critics of his carpetbagging, but he is making their point: Senator McCain's loyalty is not to any particular American place but rather to a bureaucratic institution (the military) and an abstraction (the American Empire)...

The Democrats are no more connected to particular places than is McCain. Hillary Clinton's rootlessness became a national joke in her 2000 U.S. Senate campaign to represent New York, a state in which she had never lived. Wearing a Yankees cap was about as far as she went to assert her ersatz New Yorkness. Barack Obama, lauded as the "world candidate," was born in Hawaii, a state that is only in the union because of its military significance. Raised also in Indonesia and at various times resident in Los Angeles, New York City, and finally Chicago, Obama is a "cosmopolitan"...

Why does this matter? What's wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the "human race" before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love "the world" unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. [More] . . read more

For John Warlover McCain to campaign for the highest office in the land while standing where Dr. King, the preeminent messenger for peace, was shot is hypocrisy of the vilest order and underlines the depths to which this psycho manipulator will travel for opportunity and power. After all, in 1983, McCain voted against creating a Martin Luther King federal holiday. To put it eloquently, John McChicanery sucks.

As the presidential hopeful told the booing crowd at the Lorraine Motel on Friday, "We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing," I wondered how often McCain has been anywhere near early or prompt in doing something other than the wrong thing. I think of the children of Vietnam who were melted beyond recognition by the flip of a switch, controlled by the bomber-pilot McCain.

Many who consider him a hero will say that this status is forever carved in history because when offered release from captivity, he allowed someone who'd been there longer to leave. I disagree vehemently. Certainly, it was decent of McCain to wait his turn, however this act doesn't grant him a lifetime "get outta jail free card". That was then and there have been plenty of occasions between that time and now for him to step up. McCain says he's evolved, but his evolution has an aroma of politics. [More] . . read more

But wait a minute. During the Cold War, before it collapsed in a heap of rubble, the Soviet Union was a country of nearly 250 million people. Its mighty Red Army had defeated the German Wehrmacht in World War II. The USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and it had missiles bigger than ours, capable of lobbing 20-megaton bombs on American cities. It held half a dozen European nations of ancient lineage captive, and financed dreaded revolutionary forces around the globe. It had a nuclear submarine fleet that was better than ours, and that was equipped with sea-launched missiles that could be fired at U.S. targets from locations only minutes from our coastline.

Iran, in contrast, is a poor country of 70 million. It has no nuclear weapons. It has no missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, much less of carrying them halfway around the world to U.S. targets. It hasn’t conquered or even attacked another country in centuries, and seems to show little interest in doing so (it couldn’t even defeat Iraq, a country less than half its size, which attacked it in the 1980s). Its navy consists of little boats more suitable to towing water skiers than to fighting American carrier battle groups. Its air force wouldn’t last a day in a contest with the planes from just one U.S. carrier. Hell, Iran's leadership is afraid of its own women! But Big John is afraid, and he says we all should be too. [More] . . read more

McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked... His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite... McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator. McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. [More] . . read more

In his first assertion, Senator McCain is claiming credit where credit is not due. In his second, that we are winning in Iraq, he fails to understand what “winning” means in a Fourth Generation conflict. The current reduction in violence in Iraq does not mean we are winning. Nor does al Qaeda’s incipient defeat mean we are winning. We win only if a state re-emerges, the state we destroyed by our invasion. A reduction in violence and the defeat of al Qaeda are necessary preconditions for the re-emergence of a state, but they are not sufficient to ensure it...

So McCain is wrong on both counts. The fact that a Presidential candidate is fundamentally wrong on so important a subject as the war in Iraq is disturbing. More disturbing is the nature of the errors. Both represent carryovers of Bush administration practices. [More] . . read more