Wednesday, November 5, 2008
A New Mission
All Veterans took an oath to the uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America. Now that the election is over, that oath does not go away; we have a new mission to perform. We must speak out on the history lessons of Vietnam, and the dangers of repeating those mistakes again in the current war. We must hold our government accountable by being involved and educating the citizens of this country on the dangers posed by the enemy,and caution against appeasement and retreat. We are Americans, we will support our new Commander in Chief, but we will fight for our country using all our abilities and talents until the enemy is defeated. We now must press on!
Monday, November 3, 2008
Arizona Republic Has It Right
The country needs Senator McCain to win on Tuesday, this endorsement give the reasons why his is qualified to be our President.
by Doug MacEachern - Nov. 2, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
John McCain became a national political leader through an act of forgiveness - a demonstration that wars end, wounds heal and the bitterest of enemies can put all that behind them.
Handy characteristics for someone presuming to lead the nation after this brutal election season.
The event I have in mind proved McCain in possession of an almost superhuman capacity to move forward. To cooperate with people who, not so long before, literally wished him dead.
Again, not a bad attitude for the winner of this presidential race.
It was in February 1985. Walter Cronkite had asked the Arizona congressman if he would be willing to accompany him on a return visit to Vietnam, including the infamous Hanoi prison where the former Navy pilot had spent the six worst years of his life.
This was, remember, little more than a decade after McCain had been incarcerated there. And tortured there. And tormented to within an inch of his sanity. It was the "home" that allowed congressional candidate McCain to fend off an accusation that he was a carpetbagger when he ran for Congress in Arizona in 1982: As a Navy brat, the only place he had lived longer than in Arizona was . . . Hanoi.
McCain went back. To Truc Bach lake, where on Oct. 26, 1967, a furious mob had pulled him to the shore and beat him. To the wretched Hoa Lo prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." And, to meetings with the overseers who nearly killed him.
To say the least, it was compelling viewing. But it was more than that. It created his national identity.
In Goldwater's footsteps
Less than two years later, McCain would be elected to replace an Arizona political deity, Barry Goldwater, as senator of Arizona.
His election to the Senate in 1986 would be attributable to a number of factors.
There was McCain's frenetic campaign energy, which dumbfounded competitors ("John McCain is driven," wrote my colleague, Richard de Uriarte, in The Phoenix Gazette that year. "No rural hamlet too remote to visit. No fundraiser he can't attend."). And, of course, his emerging celebrity, a natural result of having produced travelogues with Cronkite, that most trusted of newsmen.
But above all else there was the sense of something special about the man's character. He did not simply travel to meet with the people who had treated him with beastly cruelty. He did it to help move his country forward.
Two years after McCain's visit, Vietnam would begin, finally, to cooperate with the United States. At some things vitally important to McCain - determining the fate of GIs missing in action and the repatriation of remains. He started the process of healing, of moving forward, with his hand extended to those who hated him the most.
This, then, is the character trait that makes McCain not merely the superior presidential candidate of this election cycle but of nearly any era in which a candidate's character matters. Which is to say, of any era. He learns from mistakes of the past - his own, certainly, and those of others - and moves on.
Barack Obama may claim the media mantle as the 2008 agent of national unity and compromise. The candidate to move the nation forward.
But McCain is the only one of the two with a record of actually having acted, often against type, in what he saw as the national interest . . . as opposed to Obama's mere contention that, at some unspecified time in the near or distant future, we can trust him to act as something other than a faithful ideologue.
In 1989, John McCain was - by dint of politics, as well as by fact of history - the heir to Barry's legacy. He was a conservative Republican and war hero. The future was golden. And then came the "Keating Five" scandal.
Beyond Keating
Oh, McCain's involvement in those meetings with developer Charles H Keating Jr. was minimal. And his discomfort with Keating's effort to buy influence was obvious. But he was tied to the Arizona developer. There were those family jaunts with Keating to Cat Cay. Ugh.
No one moaned "Ugh!" louder than McCain himself. Love it or hate it, the real legacy of McCain's involvement in the Keating scandal was the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a wide-reaching attempt to limit special-interest influence in federal campaigns. It emanated directly from the Keating mess. McCain-Feingold, as it is known, is the result of a 10-year McCain mission to erase whatever stigma remained of those torturous Keating Five days. It is McCain's personal declaration that honor in politics still matters.
He has been the dutiful soldier who, in the course of his congressional career, crossed three different commanders in chief over their deployment of U.S. troops in harm's way overseas. And he was the rare senator willing to stand up in Congress during the worst years of Iraq, 2005 to 2007, and demand of Bush and Donald Rumsfeld that they give the troops a chance to win.
He is the conservative, tax-loathing Republican who nevertheless opposed a Republican president's tax cuts as inappropriate during war . . . then performed an abrupt about-face after recognizing how Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts had helped revive an economy jolted by a double whammy: the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
And he was the GOP senator who led the fight for the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that Democrats claim to want . . . but never proved willing to fight for. Not like McCain (and, for that matter, Sen. Jon Kyl) risked the fury of his own party fighting for.
He was the worthy soldier whose devotion to national defense set the bar for what constitutes legitimate prisoner interrogation . . . and what constitutes torture. It was McCain, not the administration presiding over Abu Ghraib, who clearly knew the difference.
It may prove true that no presidential candidate with an "R" after his name could survive the current economic turmoil. But there will be high irony if a Democrat defeats McCain as a result of the economic disaster following in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
On May 5, 2006 - more than two years before the subprime-mortgage debacle would spawn a worldwide financial holocaust - McCain and 19 other GOP senators wrote a warning letter about the lack of oversight of the mortgage industry:
"We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole."
Those warnings were ill-received by most Senate Democrats, who effectively blocked reform. Among them was the senator who accepted the second-most in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae lobbyists, Barack Obama.
The longest campaign
It is late in the campaign and certainly most serious voters have made up their minds, if not already cast their votes. The longest campaign - and one of the most arduous - is coming to an end at last.
At such a time it seems that, at the very least, most voters should feel confident that regardless who wins, we got the right guy. By now, we should know the candidates.
But almost 21 months after Obama's Feb. 10, 2007, announcement in Springfield, Ill., that he would run for the presidency, we still find ourselves guessing about what Obama really believes.
An audio tape of a 2001 Obama radio interview surfaced last Monday in which the then-Illinois state legislator discussed the history of federal courts and their impact on "redistributive change."
Obama seems to suggest that the supposedly radical-left Warren Supreme Court was not all that radical because it "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth" via the U.S. Constitution.
Evidence of Obama's socialist-Marxist-redistributive inclinations? Maybe. Or perhaps not. Obama defenders, like academic Cass Sunstein, argued that Obama merely was discussing history, not rendering judgments. But isn't it a little late to not have a real clue about a likely U.S. president's view on how (or whether) to redistribute wealth?
We know what McCain's view is regarding using the 14th Amendment to create a superwelfare state. He doesn't have any. We don't have to muse about McCain's "ideology" because no modern presidential candidate has had less of one.
McCain is a guy whose sole notion of ideology is a highly refined sense of honor. Such people have a way of leading others through hard times.
The man who made peace with his jailers in the little hotel of horrors in Hanoi is a good bet to work well with others now.
No presidential candidate knows tough times like McCain does. That's an "ideology" we could use right now.
Reach MacEachern at doug.maceachern@arizonarepublic.com.
by Doug MacEachern - Nov. 2, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
John McCain became a national political leader through an act of forgiveness - a demonstration that wars end, wounds heal and the bitterest of enemies can put all that behind them.
Handy characteristics for someone presuming to lead the nation after this brutal election season.
The event I have in mind proved McCain in possession of an almost superhuman capacity to move forward. To cooperate with people who, not so long before, literally wished him dead.
Again, not a bad attitude for the winner of this presidential race.
It was in February 1985. Walter Cronkite had asked the Arizona congressman if he would be willing to accompany him on a return visit to Vietnam, including the infamous Hanoi prison where the former Navy pilot had spent the six worst years of his life.
This was, remember, little more than a decade after McCain had been incarcerated there. And tortured there. And tormented to within an inch of his sanity. It was the "home" that allowed congressional candidate McCain to fend off an accusation that he was a carpetbagger when he ran for Congress in Arizona in 1982: As a Navy brat, the only place he had lived longer than in Arizona was . . . Hanoi.
McCain went back. To Truc Bach lake, where on Oct. 26, 1967, a furious mob had pulled him to the shore and beat him. To the wretched Hoa Lo prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." And, to meetings with the overseers who nearly killed him.
To say the least, it was compelling viewing. But it was more than that. It created his national identity.
In Goldwater's footsteps
Less than two years later, McCain would be elected to replace an Arizona political deity, Barry Goldwater, as senator of Arizona.
His election to the Senate in 1986 would be attributable to a number of factors.
There was McCain's frenetic campaign energy, which dumbfounded competitors ("John McCain is driven," wrote my colleague, Richard de Uriarte, in The Phoenix Gazette that year. "No rural hamlet too remote to visit. No fundraiser he can't attend."). And, of course, his emerging celebrity, a natural result of having produced travelogues with Cronkite, that most trusted of newsmen.
But above all else there was the sense of something special about the man's character. He did not simply travel to meet with the people who had treated him with beastly cruelty. He did it to help move his country forward.
Two years after McCain's visit, Vietnam would begin, finally, to cooperate with the United States. At some things vitally important to McCain - determining the fate of GIs missing in action and the repatriation of remains. He started the process of healing, of moving forward, with his hand extended to those who hated him the most.
This, then, is the character trait that makes McCain not merely the superior presidential candidate of this election cycle but of nearly any era in which a candidate's character matters. Which is to say, of any era. He learns from mistakes of the past - his own, certainly, and those of others - and moves on.
Barack Obama may claim the media mantle as the 2008 agent of national unity and compromise. The candidate to move the nation forward.
But McCain is the only one of the two with a record of actually having acted, often against type, in what he saw as the national interest . . . as opposed to Obama's mere contention that, at some unspecified time in the near or distant future, we can trust him to act as something other than a faithful ideologue.
In 1989, John McCain was - by dint of politics, as well as by fact of history - the heir to Barry's legacy. He was a conservative Republican and war hero. The future was golden. And then came the "Keating Five" scandal.
Beyond Keating
Oh, McCain's involvement in those meetings with developer Charles H Keating Jr. was minimal. And his discomfort with Keating's effort to buy influence was obvious. But he was tied to the Arizona developer. There were those family jaunts with Keating to Cat Cay. Ugh.
No one moaned "Ugh!" louder than McCain himself. Love it or hate it, the real legacy of McCain's involvement in the Keating scandal was the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a wide-reaching attempt to limit special-interest influence in federal campaigns. It emanated directly from the Keating mess. McCain-Feingold, as it is known, is the result of a 10-year McCain mission to erase whatever stigma remained of those torturous Keating Five days. It is McCain's personal declaration that honor in politics still matters.
He has been the dutiful soldier who, in the course of his congressional career, crossed three different commanders in chief over their deployment of U.S. troops in harm's way overseas. And he was the rare senator willing to stand up in Congress during the worst years of Iraq, 2005 to 2007, and demand of Bush and Donald Rumsfeld that they give the troops a chance to win.
He is the conservative, tax-loathing Republican who nevertheless opposed a Republican president's tax cuts as inappropriate during war . . . then performed an abrupt about-face after recognizing how Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts had helped revive an economy jolted by a double whammy: the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
And he was the GOP senator who led the fight for the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that Democrats claim to want . . . but never proved willing to fight for. Not like McCain (and, for that matter, Sen. Jon Kyl) risked the fury of his own party fighting for.
He was the worthy soldier whose devotion to national defense set the bar for what constitutes legitimate prisoner interrogation . . . and what constitutes torture. It was McCain, not the administration presiding over Abu Ghraib, who clearly knew the difference.
It may prove true that no presidential candidate with an "R" after his name could survive the current economic turmoil. But there will be high irony if a Democrat defeats McCain as a result of the economic disaster following in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
On May 5, 2006 - more than two years before the subprime-mortgage debacle would spawn a worldwide financial holocaust - McCain and 19 other GOP senators wrote a warning letter about the lack of oversight of the mortgage industry:
"We are concerned that if effective regulatory reform legislation for the housing-finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole."
Those warnings were ill-received by most Senate Democrats, who effectively blocked reform. Among them was the senator who accepted the second-most in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae lobbyists, Barack Obama.
The longest campaign
It is late in the campaign and certainly most serious voters have made up their minds, if not already cast their votes. The longest campaign - and one of the most arduous - is coming to an end at last.
At such a time it seems that, at the very least, most voters should feel confident that regardless who wins, we got the right guy. By now, we should know the candidates.
But almost 21 months after Obama's Feb. 10, 2007, announcement in Springfield, Ill., that he would run for the presidency, we still find ourselves guessing about what Obama really believes.
An audio tape of a 2001 Obama radio interview surfaced last Monday in which the then-Illinois state legislator discussed the history of federal courts and their impact on "redistributive change."
Obama seems to suggest that the supposedly radical-left Warren Supreme Court was not all that radical because it "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth" via the U.S. Constitution.
Evidence of Obama's socialist-Marxist-redistributive inclinations? Maybe. Or perhaps not. Obama defenders, like academic Cass Sunstein, argued that Obama merely was discussing history, not rendering judgments. But isn't it a little late to not have a real clue about a likely U.S. president's view on how (or whether) to redistribute wealth?
We know what McCain's view is regarding using the 14th Amendment to create a superwelfare state. He doesn't have any. We don't have to muse about McCain's "ideology" because no modern presidential candidate has had less of one.
McCain is a guy whose sole notion of ideology is a highly refined sense of honor. Such people have a way of leading others through hard times.
The man who made peace with his jailers in the little hotel of horrors in Hanoi is a good bet to work well with others now.
No presidential candidate knows tough times like McCain does. That's an "ideology" we could use right now.
Reach MacEachern at doug.maceachern@arizonarepublic.com.
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