Griper Blade: McCain's POW Crutch

Did you know John McCain was a POW during the Vietnam war? It's probably not widely known, since he never talks about it, preferring instead to keep his POW light under a bushel. In fact, you can't even ask him about his POW status or he gets irritated. When Gen. Wesley Clark brought up the fact that being shot down over Vietnam doesn't automatically qualify you for the presidency, McCain was annoyed.

ABC News gives us this glimpse from an appearance on Face the Nation:

"I think it’s up to Sen. Obama now not only to repudiate [Clark] but to cut him loose," McCain said.

McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.

"Please," he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question.

See? He doesn't like to talk about it, which is probably why you didn't know he was a POW...

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Lessons of Vietnam Lost on McCain

Joe Conason has a great piece in Salon on the similarities between John McCain's attitudes toward Vietnam and his attitudes toward Iraq.

clipped from www.salon.com Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won -- that we should have won -- with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."

Given how McCain feels about Vietnam, we can assume that the concept of a "lost cause" is alien to the man's mind. Like Vietnam, there is no winning -- it was doomed from day one. Logic dictates that wars without purpose can't be won, because there's no objective to achieve,

Not a realistic ones, anyway.

For McCain, it's all about winning or losing, not whether anything we're doing makes any damned sense at all. He seems to think that admitting a mistake is akin to forfeiting a football game by quitting in the middle of it.

He doesn't seem capable of considering foreign policy objectively or realistically.

Griper Blade: When is an Epidemic not an Epidemic?

The TimesOnline gets right to the lead:

More American military veterans have been committing suicide than US soldiers have been dying in Iraq, it was claimed yesterday.

What TimesOnline is relaying is a CBS News story on what's finally being labeled a "suicide epidemic" among veterans. While the rate for all vets is higher than the rest of the population, one group stood out.

...Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)

"Wow! Those are devastating," said Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group Veterans For Common Sense.

Contrast that with the comment by Dr. Ira Katz, mental health head at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Katz told CBS, "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem."...

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