Eighth Prominent Democrat Denigrates McCain's Military Service

This time it's former Kerry foreign policy adviser Rand Beers, fretting that McCain missed out on all that good Vietnam-era political education due to his being "isolated" from the country in a cage.

Of course Obama -- A Different Kind of Politician (TM) -- makes the rote "rejection" of some comments, and yet, somehow, they just keep on coming.

This is a bad move by Obama -- and yes, with eight prominent Democrats trying out different variations of "McCain's service is meaningless/actually makes him a less fit candidate" to see which one the public might like, it's a move by Obama himself.

McCain fights dirty (or at least fights angry) when he thinks his honor or integrity or service has been impugned, and here it's beyond question. Hopefully McCain will wake up from his dream-world in which he and Obama nobly rise above "personal attacks" on the other and respond with some counter-fire.

So McCain doesn't have enough foreign policy experience because he was unfortunately "isolated" from the intensity of the leftist anti-war movement in America.

Given that Obama's "Chicago mainstream" pals are terrorist bombesr for the Weather Underground, we know he's familiar with that period and its predominant mode of leftist thought. So I guess he's the one with real experience, huh?

Audio: at Hot Air.

Allah notes that Rand Beers wants to claim John Kerry had the the requisite experience (given he was so closely associated with Kerry), so his distinction turns on whether someone served in the "ground forces" or not.

But Beers allows you didn't have to be in the ground forces to have garnered foreign policy experience -- so long as you were not serving in the military at all but experiencing the "turmoil" at home, then everything's jake.

So: Beers and Kerry have the sufficient military/foreign policy experience. Barack Obama, by dint of his not serving in the military and experiencing Vietnam through television, also has it.

The one guy who doesn't have it? The guy who spent five and half years being tortured by the enemy and who turned down early release to honor the principle of first in, first out, and stand in solidarity with his fellow captured servicemen.

Update: Good James Kirchick article in the Politico.

The only obstacle between Barack Obama and the presidency is the mountain of smears that will no doubt come his way. That’s the narrative that Obama supporters — and his swooning chroniclers in the mainstream media — would have us believe.

...

Writers Evan Thomas and Richard Wolfe concluded that the 2008 presidential election will be no different. “It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as ‘the other’ — as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.”

But has it been a “sure bet?”

Not really. Thus far, no one with any serious affiliation to John McCain's campaign has resorted to the alleged “scare” tactics in which Republicans — and, apparently, only Republicans — have been perfecting since Richard Nixon was first elected. On the contrary, if the past few months have showed us anything, it’s that the Obama campaign is the one dealing in crude smears.

[Recounts various Democratic denigrations of McCain's war record, from Jay "Sgt. Rock" Rockefeller to Rand Beers.]

It’s curious how anyone could argue that a man with such visceral understanding of the capacity for what America’s enemies will do to our men and women in uniform doesn’t fully appreciate the cost of war. But even more troubling is the unmistakable pattern of these smears, all of them unsubtly alleging that McCain is an unhinged, mentally unstable warmonger who would deploy soldiers capriciously because he hasn’t truly experienced the horrors of ground battle. Indeed, the claims of these four men — and the short period of time in which they were all uttered — are so similar in tone that one would be foolish not to at least consider the possibility they were coordinated by the Obama campaign.

Nevertheless, the fears of Obama supporters that their candidate lies eternally vulnerable to GOP smears exists only in their fevered imaginations....

The belief that “the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968” is a comforting salve for Democrats. After all, it’s much easier for them to demonize conservatives than consider that the reason for their electoral defeats may lie with liberal ideas. Please don’t take that as a "smear.”

posted by Ace at 01:14 PM

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