thoughts from a brokenSoldier

     I was reading through some articles tonight, and I saw this piece from the New York Times about a recent fundraiser held for John McCain in the Hamptons.  Now I know it’s late, so I read through this thing twice to make sure I wasn’t somehow getting it wrong, but I thought - and then confirmed - that I saw McCain pull off the trifecta of intellectual dishonesty.  For all of you keeping score at home, I’ll lay out its components.  First, you base an argument on a premise that completely denies a basic fact.  Next, accuse someone else of denying a supposed basic fact in their criticism of your denial.  Lastly - and pay attention because this one is important - make sure you then commit the exact same transgression by denying another basic fact again in the exact same speech.  In a discussion concerning Iraq, McCain said:

"Senator Obama opposed the surge, and said it wouldn’t work, and continued to say it wouldn’t work and refuses to acknowledge today."

     McCain’s repeated claims that the surge "worked" are a complete dismissal of the fact that the surge’s primary purpose was not the reduction of violence for its own sake, but rather to achieve the overall goal of allowing the Iraqi Congress to make progress during the surge (which was both a military and political initiative), with the evaluation criteria set forth in 18 benchmarks that would determine success.  While the military’s task in this was to reduce the violence in order to allow political progress, the overarching national goal was to spur the Iraqi government into action in order to set the stage for the creation of the conditions in which our troops can come home.  So while the military has been able to do its job to this point, the Bush administration has definitely not held up its end of the bargain.  And if that is any indication of the government’s potential for future success in its endeavors in the pursuit of restoring Iraq, I’d say the best way we can support our troops is to get them the hell out of there so the administration can’t keep leaving them hanging while they continue to screw up their own plans.  While the government stumbles its way around in Iraq, the soldiers on the ground get stuck in the middle, with both no way out and no discernable way forward, and are forced to do what they can to make the best out of their untenable situation.  But the basic failure of the surge to accomplish the goals specifically outlined for it is simply not the issue according to McCain, who continues to deceptively portray the whole deal as a success based on the fact that one out of the two stated goals of the plan has been successful to this point.  I’m reminded of the line in Mars Attacks from Jack Nicholson’s character as the President after Congress was eliminated by Martian ray guns:

"I want the people to know that they still have 2 out of 3 branches of the government working for them, and that ain’t bad."

     But this has been an argurment coming from McCain for a while, and is not all that shocking in and of itself.  What really got me was what came towards the end of the article, when McCain said the following concerning the current polls and how he plans to win over the voters in the general election this fall:

"I think they are really going to wait until the conventions and then the last couple of months. We have to do everything right, just as we did in the primaries. We’ve got to do everything exactly right."

(Bold mine for emphasis)

     Wait a minute - did I somehow miss the fact that I was abducted and taken to an alternate existence during the primary season?  Because in the world I was in at the time, McCain’s campaign just about tanked in July 2007, when he had to fire his campaign manager Terry Nelson.  I mean sure, it’s impressive that he was able to turn everything around and win the nomination, but when a campaign runs aground as bad as his did in early July of last year, it makes his current claim that they "did everything right" look utterly ridiculous, and due to the abundance of evidence to the contrary - none more important than the very fact that McCain was obviously there when all of this took place - it looks like a very deliberate deception designed to mislead those who might not have paid close attention to the primaries.

     Seriously, do we really need a President who is so bad at upper-level organizational management that he has twice had to clean out his own campaign staff prior to even making it to his party’s convention?  If he can’t assemble a staff that can function long enough to simply get him through the nomination process (much less the general election), then what chance does he have of assembling a functional cabinet - which is much larger and more complex than that of a campaign staff - that can competently and successfully run a national government for four years with any sort of continuity, especially when he fails to acknowledge the mistakes he has made?  Hmm, what is it that sounds familiar about a politician who is utterly convinced that he is right - despite the available evidence proving otherwise - and is not swayed by public opinion when it runs contrary to his own, coupled with an inability to admit his mistakes and a willingess to lie in order to gloss over the truth?  Do we really want to live through the past eight years again?  Aside from that, can this nation truly afford to do so?

     Personally, I think this country is long overdue for a Chief Executive that has a track record far better than John McCain’s in the area of higher-echelon management and sound judgement in the selection of his advisors.  We want better, we need better, and above all, we deserve better.