Greetings, from Arizona. McCain's home state.
The Tucson Weekly of Feb. 7-13 has an article entitled "Puffing Up John McCain."
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/...
There's more:
... standard summary of McCain's 5 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton, repeated in thousands of media accounts during his 2000 campaign and again this election year, is the founding myth of his political career. The tale of John McCain, War Hero, prompts a lot of people turned off by his politics--liberals and traditional conservatives alike--to support him. Who cares that he "doesn't really understand economics"?
Ha! I care that he doesn't understand ecomomics. It seems that with each passing year of trickle-down I have to work harder to stay even, and I am not getting any younger.
No less than Iraq, Vietnam was an undeclared, illegal war of aggression that did nothing to keep America safe.
Yeah, how do they know that Al Qaeda is in Iraq? Because George Bush and Dick Cheney say so? Is Al Qaeda even a threat? Weren't they badly almost beaten in Afghanistan?
"I am a war criminal," McCain said on 60 Minutes in 1997. "I bombed innocent women and children." Although it came too late to save the Vietnamese he'd killed 30 years earlier, it was a brave statement. Nevertheless, he today smiles agreeably as he hears himself described as a "war hero" as he arrives at rallies in a bus marked "No Surrender."
McCain's tragic flaw: He knows the right thing. He often sets out to do the right thing. But he doesn't follow through. We saw McCain's weak character in 2000, when the Bush campaign defeated him in the crucial South Carolina primary by smearing his family. Placing his presidential ambitions first, he swallowed his pride, set aside his honor and campaigned for Bush ... .
Should I assume that McCain "knows the right thing?"
McCain wrote in his confession to the North Vietnamese:
"I am a black criminal, and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate."
The takeaway:
McCain has always been truthful about his behavior as a POW, but he has been more than willing to allow others to lie on his behalf. "A proven leader, and a man of integrity," the New York Post says, and he's happy to take it. "All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused." Not really. He did denounce his country.
It's the old tragic flaw: McCain knows what he ought to do. He starts to do the right thing. But John McCain is a weak man who puts his career goals first.
Has John McCain been AWOL? What of the war crimes in Iraq? What of the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Did he learn nothing from his experience in Vietnam?
Read the entire article. In there, you'll see that he cracked for a selfish reason: he thought that he needed medical attention.
Now, I have never been a POW and don't know what I would have done under the circumstances; however, I was in the Army and it was made very clear, more than once, that we should only provide name, rank and serial number in the event of capture.