The Pain of McCain

With the latest in attack dog politics from the pit bull in lipstick and the whisper but wave a big ass club Neanderthal proclamations of the pit bull’s running mate (“The Presidency… so easy a cave man can do it”), I can no longer stomach the soft, respectful, reverent tones used to describe John McCain as a “Great American.”

The truth is that the “Maverick” is just a self-righteous, self-inflated, permanently angry, lying, cozener who respects very little besides his wife’s money and the fantasy that he suffered “righteously” in that hell hole he was stuck in because to acknowledge its worthlessness, pointlessness, immorality and servility would be to make his suffering there, and even his entire life afterward, meaningless.

John McCain’s primary claim to fame is that he spent years in a North Vietnamese prison after being shot down while on a bombing run over civilian areas where, as part of the general Johnson/Nixon campaign to “bomb them back into the Stone Age” he obliterated the homes and lives of thousands of innocent Vietnamese people whose only crime was being on the wrong side of American Imperial interests in the South East Asian peninsula.

The truth is that John McCain should not have been in Viet Nam to begin with, because WE should not have been in Viet Nam to begin with. This fact is common knowledge, and has been common knowledge ever since Daniel Ellsberg showed the moral fortitude to apprehend and then make public The Pentagon Papers, documents which reveal in depth the illegal and immoral ways that our government violated international law, lied to the American pubic, subverted agreed upon Vietnamese elections and finally plunged head over heels into the destruction of a country and a society for the sole purpose of achieving control of the government, the people, and the natural resources (even a Republican like Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about this). It is the story of how we turned a former ally (Ho Chi Minh) into a monstrous dictator and sold him to the American people as a threat to U.S. interest and universal world peace.

Any of this sounding familiar?

Now… it is John McCain’s life goal to see that thousands of American soldiers – the people he claims to value and respect – along with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, suffer and die in order to redeem America’s image as WINNERS, for one reason only… so that John McCain can finally lay to rest the ghosts of the Hanoi Hilton.

On the way, his campaign has recently decided to wage a vicious attack on Barack Obama for being “a friend of terrorists.” This being a reference to former founder and leader of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers. Ayers, who is now a college professor, was never associated with Obama in his radical days (Obama was, after all a kid in Hawaii at the time). McCain, and now the Pit Bull, insist on declaring him a “terrorist who targets innocent people” while during the same period of time, John McCain was targeting a far greater number of innocent people and killing and maiming them in “Shock and Awe” of American flash and fire, because he was commanded to do so by his superior officers, and because he personally thought it was a good idea. Even after he knew that the war was both wrong, and illegal, McCain continued and continues to suggest that those innocents who died in Viet Nam (Vietnamese innocents AND American military draftees) could have been redeemed by killing and killing and killing until the war was finally WON.

Now… he insists that this is the strategy we must have in Iraq, another war set up to topple a former ally after he became inconvenient to American interests, begun under direct deception and criminal conspiracy against the Congress and the American public, and waged in a fragmented, ineffective, directionless way because there’s no other way to fight a war you should never have started in the first place.

The terrorist is NOT Bill Ayers… The terrorist is NOT Barack Obama… The terrorist is John McCain. He is willing to send the very military personnel he claims to revere into harm’s way for a war with no purpose and no direction in order to do one thing and one thing only… to redeem HIS PERSONAL SUFFERING of 40 years ago. Along the way, he is willing to sacrifice not only those young men and women who offer their trust, their dreams, their bodies, and their lives to protect us - on the assumption that they will not be asked to sacrifice themselves for no reason – but he is also willing to sacrifice any and all of the best interests of the country he claims to value, love and protect.

He’s got a lot of support on that one, because there are a lot of people in the country who have suffered with the same agony as John. They cannot accept the fact that in Viet Nam (or now in Iraq) the sacrifice they made and are making is anything but honorable. And don’t get me wrong… I believe that it IS honorable, because as someone said recently (I actually think it was Joe Biden, but I'm still trying to find the exact quote), when a soldier makes the sacrifice of their body or their life, the value of that sacrifice is inherent in their dedication; it is NOT DEPENDENT ON ANYTHING ELSE. It doesn't matter whether or not the commanders they trust and believe in were in fact trustworthy. It doesn't even matter if the cause is just. The sacrifice and service, the dedication and commitment should be honored… but NOT by sending more people to kill and die for a lie… for a scam… for a mistake.

This election… and ending this war… is not about John McCain’s 40 year old suffering. It is about US. It is about soldiers who have been lied to and asked to sacrifice for a scheme and a nightmare, as if mistakes of the past can be remedied with mistakes in the future. It is about a nation that has been fed like cheap dog food to the fevered money grubbing greedheads, and the need to snatch that nation, its history and its ideals, back from those fevered jaws that would snap it up and swallow it whole. It is about personal fortune and self-inflation and the need to stop these robbers and liars before they wreck the country completely.

It is about finding John McCain a better way than the Presidency to relieve his personal pain.