hillary swept in caucases/here come the tears...again
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The power and the story
Prison shaped his character. Scandal shaped his crusade. But is John McCain's biography enough to take him to the White House?
By Nancy Gibbs and John F. Dickerson
December 6, 1999
Web posted at: 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT)
By the time he came out of his Hanoi prison, John McCain had learned the power of stories. He had been raised on them. The son and grandson of admirals forever at sea, he had spent more time with their legends than with the men themselves. Among the POWs, he was the prison storyteller, the one who helped pass the days by retelling, scene by scene, his favorite Marlon Brando movies, who offered a course he called A History of the World from the Beginning, the one who was allowed 10 minutes with a Bible one Christmas so he could refresh his memory of Bethlehem and lead a service in their cell. But it was not until he was home, a famous, crippled war hero, that he met Ronald Reagan and learned from the master that he now had the ultimate political weapon.
Reagan was Governor of California in 1974, when he invited McCain to a prayer breakfast in Sacramento. McCain has never been a particularly reverent guy; but that morning he found himself telling the silent crowd about a discovery he made when he was thrown into solitary confinement in a 6-ft. by 9-ft. hole in the ground. On the wall was etched a testimony, scratched into the stone by a previous occupant: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty," read the jagged writing. The words sustained him, McCain told the crowd, through his 2 1/2-year solitude. When he finished, the audience, including the Governor, was sobbing. "I realized," he says now, "it wasn't really me that moved them. It was the Story that did it."
The Story. You could argue that the story of McCain's remarkable rise, to the point where he now has a chance of snatching the G.O.P. nomination away from the $65 Million Man, is the Story of a story. It is not just that the commentariat has concluded that this presidential race is all about character and biography and that McCain's, at the moment, is a best seller. It is not just that McCain's story defines the man: You cannot scare me, I've been scared by professionals, and I have nothing to lose because every day is a gift I once thought I'd never have.
The story is his running mate, and has been from the day he decided to leave the Navy for politics. It has served as both weapon and shield, a kind of deterrent that makes him easy to fear, hard to attack, hard sometimes even to live with. Throughout his rise to power, it was the story that could both win people over and shut people down. Who among his adversaries wanted to answer the question, "So just what were you doing from 1967 till 1973, while he was being maimed and tortured in service to his country?"
The story has helped protect him from his own faults, his ethical lapses, his ugly outbursts, the abandoned first marriage, because he admits to failures that sound more heroic than most people's successes, and it is hard to judge someone who has made choices most civilians can't even imagine. It's not just that he survived being hung by ropes from two broken arms and beaten senseless; it's that when his captors learned of his famous father and offered to let him go home, he refused unless they let the rest of the prisoners go as well. Such conduct enthralls a generation that aches for heroes and doubts the moral detour it took during the years John McCain was becoming the icon of Duty, Honor and Country. So compelling is the Story that it has helped bring him here, to a dead heat in New Hampshire with the Texas Governor: the man to whom much has been given against the man from whom much was taken away.
The question is whether, having come so far, he is now a prisoner all over again, this time of his biography. He has traded on it for so long you wonder whether he can break away from it and make the story not about him but about us; whether, having caught his audience, brightened the lights, earned his newsmagazine cover, he can stand up and tell us where he wants to go and what he wants to do. That way, voters might get to judge whether the events that changed his life would help him change ours. Or whether, as a longtime observer says, his bio is all he has.
It was no accident that the first four questions McCain faced in last week's Republican debate were not about Medicare or Chechnya or Microsoft; they were all about him. Just how bad is your temper, Senator, and why do some of the people who know you best dislike you most? Why are people whispering that your years in prison left you slightly unhinged?
Well, McCain replied, as he has all along, he speaks his mind and tells the truth: "It is very clear to all," he said Thursday night, "the lobbyists and special-influence people who run Washington know that if John McCain is President, things are going to be a lot different." But there is more to the charges than that. The whispering campaign aims to turn his story against him: he's not really like the rest of us, give him a medal but don't make him President. "I attribute it all to the abuse," says a former Senator after cataloging McCain's explosions. "He has a very short fuse and blows quickly," adds a Senate staff member, part of the faceless choir that has haunted McCain for weeks now. "That would bother me in a President, who has to be disciplined. I do not believe his temper is controlled."
And so last week, the McCain campaign caught the grenade and tossed it back. McCain's medical records, including psychiatric reports and a virtual orthopedic encyclopedia of his broken bones, were released. "Patient seems to have made an excellent readjustment over the past year," read his mental evaluation just a year after his return. "There is no sign of emotional difficulty." Years of subsequent evaluations found no clue that anything was rattling around in McCain's cupboards. Besides answering the critics, the campaign knew the release of the records brought a second benefit: We've had the book and the documentary; now comes the unabridged version, a chance to tell the Story one more time.
The funny thing about McCain's story is that it has always worked better on other people than it has worked on him. The whole hero mantle, he claims, makes his skin crawl. That may be carefully calculated modesty, but it may also reflect a nagging problem. "It doesn't take a lot of talent," he says, every chance he gets, "to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane." And yet that failure as a pilot meant that he joined the truly tiny group of men who returned home from a reviled war and were welcomed with parades and medals and a handshake from the President.
That he survived at all gave the country reason to consecrate him. But McCain, a rascal midshipman who graduated near the bottom of his class, had found his faith in a different standard, where glory is measured by commitment to causes larger than oneself. And if everyone around him was saying he had brought honor to his family name, he didn't yet have reason to believe it. "They are treating us like heroes," he told his Naval Academy roommate Chuck Larson when he got back to the States, "and all I did was get shot down and try to survive the best I could. I really want to put that behind me. What's important to me is what I do from now on. I don't want to live and be nothing but a POW." It's not that the story was a lie; it's just that no one understood it the way he did.
And so all the parades and the praise just made McCain more impatient to live up to the expectations that had been set for him practically at birth. He didn't have time to lash out at the political system that had abandoned him or the counterculture that called his comrades baby killers. His cause was more immediate and personal. "The years he was in prison were like cutting out the fillet of a T-bone steak," says Nancy Reynolds, a longtime Reagan aide who befriended McCain during those years. "After that, John was always playing catch-up."
The one place where McCain could not make up lost time, the one arena where his story in a strange way carried the least weight, was in the military. When he came back from Vietnam, he toyed briefly with "alternative plans in civilian life in politics," according to doctors who debriefed him. But McCain only toyed with the idea, choosing instead to study at the War College, become a Navy flight instructor in 1974, and then, in 1977, to take a job his father had held 20 years before, as the Navy's liaison to the Senate. In this last role, the road forked. Even as he took that job, it was clear that his Navy career was stalled. His war injuries were still bad enough to rule out a sea command. It had taken years of physical therapy for him to be able to bend his knee again, and to this day he can't raise either arm above his head. Though his father and grandfather had been the only father-and-son four-star admirals in U.S. history, McCain was passed over by a promotions board.
..................................................
They say he is a loose cannon. His temper cannot be controlled.
:shrug:
Prison shaped his character. Scandal shaped his crusade. But is John McCain's biography enough to take him to the White House?
By Nancy Gibbs and John F. Dickerson
December 6, 1999
Web posted at: 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT)
By the time he came out of his Hanoi prison, John McCain had learned the power of stories. He had been raised on them. The son and grandson of admirals forever at sea, he had spent more time with their legends than with the men themselves. Among the POWs, he was the prison storyteller, the one who helped pass the days by retelling, scene by scene, his favorite Marlon Brando movies, who offered a course he called A History of the World from the Beginning, the one who was allowed 10 minutes with a Bible one Christmas so he could refresh his memory of Bethlehem and lead a service in their cell. But it was not until he was home, a famous, crippled war hero, that he met Ronald Reagan and learned from the master that he now had the ultimate political weapon.
Reagan was Governor of California in 1974, when he invited McCain to a prayer breakfast in Sacramento. McCain has never been a particularly reverent guy; but that morning he found himself telling the silent crowd about a discovery he made when he was thrown into solitary confinement in a 6-ft. by 9-ft. hole in the ground. On the wall was etched a testimony, scratched into the stone by a previous occupant: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty," read the jagged writing. The words sustained him, McCain told the crowd, through his 2 1/2-year solitude. When he finished, the audience, including the Governor, was sobbing. "I realized," he says now, "it wasn't really me that moved them. It was the Story that did it."
The Story. You could argue that the story of McCain's remarkable rise, to the point where he now has a chance of snatching the G.O.P. nomination away from the $65 Million Man, is the Story of a story. It is not just that the commentariat has concluded that this presidential race is all about character and biography and that McCain's, at the moment, is a best seller. It is not just that McCain's story defines the man: You cannot scare me, I've been scared by professionals, and I have nothing to lose because every day is a gift I once thought I'd never have.
The story is his running mate, and has been from the day he decided to leave the Navy for politics. It has served as both weapon and shield, a kind of deterrent that makes him easy to fear, hard to attack, hard sometimes even to live with. Throughout his rise to power, it was the story that could both win people over and shut people down. Who among his adversaries wanted to answer the question, "So just what were you doing from 1967 till 1973, while he was being maimed and tortured in service to his country?"
The story has helped protect him from his own faults, his ethical lapses, his ugly outbursts, the abandoned first marriage, because he admits to failures that sound more heroic than most people's successes, and it is hard to judge someone who has made choices most civilians can't even imagine. It's not just that he survived being hung by ropes from two broken arms and beaten senseless; it's that when his captors learned of his famous father and offered to let him go home, he refused unless they let the rest of the prisoners go as well. Such conduct enthralls a generation that aches for heroes and doubts the moral detour it took during the years John McCain was becoming the icon of Duty, Honor and Country. So compelling is the Story that it has helped bring him here, to a dead heat in New Hampshire with the Texas Governor: the man to whom much has been given against the man from whom much was taken away.
The question is whether, having come so far, he is now a prisoner all over again, this time of his biography. He has traded on it for so long you wonder whether he can break away from it and make the story not about him but about us; whether, having caught his audience, brightened the lights, earned his newsmagazine cover, he can stand up and tell us where he wants to go and what he wants to do. That way, voters might get to judge whether the events that changed his life would help him change ours. Or whether, as a longtime observer says, his bio is all he has.
It was no accident that the first four questions McCain faced in last week's Republican debate were not about Medicare or Chechnya or Microsoft; they were all about him. Just how bad is your temper, Senator, and why do some of the people who know you best dislike you most? Why are people whispering that your years in prison left you slightly unhinged?
Well, McCain replied, as he has all along, he speaks his mind and tells the truth: "It is very clear to all," he said Thursday night, "the lobbyists and special-influence people who run Washington know that if John McCain is President, things are going to be a lot different." But there is more to the charges than that. The whispering campaign aims to turn his story against him: he's not really like the rest of us, give him a medal but don't make him President. "I attribute it all to the abuse," says a former Senator after cataloging McCain's explosions. "He has a very short fuse and blows quickly," adds a Senate staff member, part of the faceless choir that has haunted McCain for weeks now. "That would bother me in a President, who has to be disciplined. I do not believe his temper is controlled."
And so last week, the McCain campaign caught the grenade and tossed it back. McCain's medical records, including psychiatric reports and a virtual orthopedic encyclopedia of his broken bones, were released. "Patient seems to have made an excellent readjustment over the past year," read his mental evaluation just a year after his return. "There is no sign of emotional difficulty." Years of subsequent evaluations found no clue that anything was rattling around in McCain's cupboards. Besides answering the critics, the campaign knew the release of the records brought a second benefit: We've had the book and the documentary; now comes the unabridged version, a chance to tell the Story one more time.
The funny thing about McCain's story is that it has always worked better on other people than it has worked on him. The whole hero mantle, he claims, makes his skin crawl. That may be carefully calculated modesty, but it may also reflect a nagging problem. "It doesn't take a lot of talent," he says, every chance he gets, "to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane." And yet that failure as a pilot meant that he joined the truly tiny group of men who returned home from a reviled war and were welcomed with parades and medals and a handshake from the President.
That he survived at all gave the country reason to consecrate him. But McCain, a rascal midshipman who graduated near the bottom of his class, had found his faith in a different standard, where glory is measured by commitment to causes larger than oneself. And if everyone around him was saying he had brought honor to his family name, he didn't yet have reason to believe it. "They are treating us like heroes," he told his Naval Academy roommate Chuck Larson when he got back to the States, "and all I did was get shot down and try to survive the best I could. I really want to put that behind me. What's important to me is what I do from now on. I don't want to live and be nothing but a POW." It's not that the story was a lie; it's just that no one understood it the way he did.
And so all the parades and the praise just made McCain more impatient to live up to the expectations that had been set for him practically at birth. He didn't have time to lash out at the political system that had abandoned him or the counterculture that called his comrades baby killers. His cause was more immediate and personal. "The years he was in prison were like cutting out the fillet of a T-bone steak," says Nancy Reynolds, a longtime Reagan aide who befriended McCain during those years. "After that, John was always playing catch-up."
The one place where McCain could not make up lost time, the one arena where his story in a strange way carried the least weight, was in the military. When he came back from Vietnam, he toyed briefly with "alternative plans in civilian life in politics," according to doctors who debriefed him. But McCain only toyed with the idea, choosing instead to study at the War College, become a Navy flight instructor in 1974, and then, in 1977, to take a job his father had held 20 years before, as the Navy's liaison to the Senate. In this last role, the road forked. Even as he took that job, it was clear that his Navy career was stalled. His war injuries were still bad enough to rule out a sea command. It had taken years of physical therapy for him to be able to bend his knee again, and to this day he can't raise either arm above his head. Though his father and grandfather had been the only father-and-son four-star admirals in U.S. history, McCain was passed over by a promotions board.
..................................................
They say he is a loose cannon. His temper cannot be controlled.
:shrug:
............................................................
Just the budget and his inability to control spending makes him one of the worst Presidents in history.
Too many lies and arrogance along the way.
He truly should be embarressed. a 22 % rating approval. you think he is good huh :shrug:
But when the subject turns to the dining-room-table issues that top every list of voter concerns--education, health care, moral values--McCain seems to lose some fire. In last week's debate, he took a question about how to fix HMOs--an issue as salient as they come--and not once but twice pivoted to talk instead about Internet taxation.
...................................................................
Any candidate who is not committed to change the Healthcare system in this country should not
be elected .
It is absoulutely pitiful the way the healthcare is run in this country. It has to be fixed. This cannot stand .
Obama seems to have the most intelligent approach to fixing it. Hitlery had her chance and failed miserably .
if you call him osama hussain again , you and me are going round and round hedgehog
...................................................................
Any candidate who is not committed to change the Healthcare system in this country should not
be elected .
It is absoulutely pitiful the way the healthcare is run in this country. It has to be fixed. This cannot stand .
Obama seems to have the most intelligent approach to fixing it. Hitlery had her chance and failed miserably .
if you call him osama hussain again , you and me are going round and round hedgehog
........................................................
The United States is a deeply fractured polity. The US has always had significant political, economic and social divisions throughout its short history. Yet just as a diversity of political ideologies have been obfuscated by an electoral system dominated by two parties, deep schisms have, over the last few generations, been largely contained and managed by the civil religion of Americanism underwritten by the post-war prosperity that created a middle class.
The hope and possibility of improving one's lot through hard work has kept the underlying divisions in the US from festering too severely. But the middle class is now under attack from two sides: First, from corporate America, as epitomized by Wal-Mart whose "everyday low prices" are subsidized by government assistance provided to its hard-working employees, who earn poverty wages with insufficient benefits [1]; Second, from a strange new brand of so-called conservatives who have reduced the social safety net at time of great economic insecurity, while greatly expanding the size and scope of the government, leaving record-breaking budget deficits for generations to come.
George W. Bush has led the neoconservatives to a quite impressive number of unprecedented victories, in the process bringing to the surface and crystallizing America's profound disharmony. While it is most likely too early to give any sort of final assessment on Bush's legacy * the damage isn't done * I submit the following for the record.
With the recent release of the final report of Bush's "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction," we have an authoritative, definitive answer: the Bush administration, which has displayed consistency to the point of irresponsibility in emphasizing alleged WMD's as its major justification for attacking Iraq, was "dead wrong." Of course, the report's authors were careful to stick to their mandate, which authorized them only to blame the intelligence community and not to investigate how the "intelligence" was used or influenced by policy makers. But what should be clear to anyone paying attention was quietly acknowledged in the report: "the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers seemed to be 'selling' intelligence * in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested." The White House got what it wanted.
Not only was the Bush administration dead wrong, but the actions they justified with this information have directly resulted in up to, and possibly more than 20,000 dead bodies: over 1,700 soldiers from the US-led coalition forces and between 17,000 and 20,000 Iraqi civilians.
But perhaps more remarkable than anything is that these and other facts have done nothing to diminish Bush's support among the American public. Indeed, it may be Bush's crowning achievement that reason has ceased to be an effective component of political discourse in the US. Rather, appeals to emotion (fortified by lies, half-truths and image management) have become the primary form of persuasion in American politics.[2]
In the wake of Bush's political tsunami, logic must be counted among the dead. Rational argument, along with accountability, has become as quaint as the Geneva Conventions. Yet, for those who can still be persuaded by reason, here are three important questions for which we can now contrast the Bush administration's initial claims with the eventual outcomes. (Again, I submit these for the record, though I do not expect that any facts will persuade any Bush supporters.)
Why did the US attack Iraq?
On March 30, 2003, ten days after air strikes began and the first day that US marines and Army troops engaged the Iraqi Republican Guard, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld declared, "We know where the WMDs are."
On May 29, 2003, just over three weeks after Bush declared the official end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, he continued the charade, asserting, "We found the weapons of mass destruction."[3]
Even a year after the invasion Bush maintained his alleged firm belief in the existence of WMDs and continued to use this as a justification for the invasion. In an April 13, 2004 press conference a reporter lobbed a typical softball to Bush: "After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?" In a typical display of elegance, humility and self-reflection, Bush responded:
I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. [Laughter] John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, 'Gosh, he could have done it better this way or that way.' You know, I just * I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn't yet.
I would have gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan [sic]. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein. See, I happen to believe that we'll find out the truth on the weapons. That's why we've sent up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm [emphasis added].
And so, with the commission's report we now have the truth that Bush so eagerly awaited:
There were no WMDs;
The intelligence community was "crippled by its inability to collect meaningful intelligence on Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs";
The White House and Congress made the decision to go to war using intelligence based on "old assumptions" and lies; and
Nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence community remains riddled with systemic problems, still impaired and plagued with wide-ranging intelligence failures.
Predictably, Bush's response is to disavow the major conclusions of the report and promise more of the same: "Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives my administration will continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify threats before they fully emerge." Or, as it turns out, nonexistent threats.
"It turns out we were all wrong," said Bush's chief weapons inspector David Kay in a January 28, 2004 testimony to Congress, "there were no large stockpiles of WMD." But we weren't all wrong. Many on the left had questioned the politicized intelligence from the beginning, arguing the whole time that Iraq had no connection to 9/11 or Al Qaeda, that the shift in focus from bin Laden to Hussein was the result of a previously-formed administration plan to go after Iraq rather than the outcome of a sustained focus in the so-called war on terror, and that any threat from Hussein was unlikely and certainly not immanent.
Indeed, the pages of the Counterpunch website were filled with such pleas to reason. For instance, three weeks before the invasion of Iraq began, I wrote on Counterpunch.org: "Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, told incoming President Bush that 'Iraq no longer poses a military threat to its neighbors.' More strikingly, in a report to congress right before the Joint Resolution on Iraq was passed, the CIA said that 'Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical and biological weapons against the United States.'[4]
But Bush's popular and congressional support was not based on logic or reason. Rather, the Bush administration had gotten its way through emotional appeals, exemplified by Condi's scare tactic: "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
What will the war entail and achieve?
The three major architects of the war were Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz. Each played their role in selling the war:
"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly... (in) weeks rather than months."
* Vice President Cheney [3/16/03].
The war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
* Rumsfeld [2/7/03].
"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."
* Wolfowitz [2/27/2003].
Knowing what we know now, these comments are at best willfully optimistic. But, again, the current state of affairs in Iraq was predicted quite clearly by many opponents of the war before the invasion began. Indeed, looking again at the protestations written on Counterpunch's website, it is hard to interpret these comments as displaying anything other than the sheer incompetence of the war's architects * and a triumph of ideology over reason. For example, in a series of articles on Counterpunch, Zoltan Grossman, a political geographer and expert in global ethnic relations, argued that US and coalition forces would face a resilient Shi'ite insurgency and predicted that Saddam's capture would intensify the insurgency.[5]
Of the 1500 dead American soldiers, 1400 of them were killed in the two years since Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and the occupation drags on. The situation in Iraq now is one of extreme economic and political instability and uncertainty. Electricity is available for only a small fraction of each day, food is in short supply and the sewage and sanitation systems are not operating.[6] Iraqis are being tortured by occupation forces in the same prisons used by Hussein. In general, chaos reigns: "As many as 5,000 Iraqis have been kidnapped in the last year and a half, according to Western and Iraqi security officials," the New York Times reports, most of them for ransom unrelated to political motivations.[7]
How will the war be financed?
Finally, the question of the financial cost of the war must be added to the human cost. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, recently rewarded by Bush with a nomination to head the World Bank (and subsequently confirmed), told the House Committee on Appropriations at a Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation on March 27, 2003:
There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi peopleand on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three yearsWe're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
Currently the US has spent over $200 billion since the invasion in March 2003 and the administration has recently asked for an additional $82 billion (outside the normal budget process). Again, if this displays anything other than sheer incompetence on the part of the administration's war architects, it is the triumph of belief and emotion over reason. When history proclaims its final verdict on Bush's legacy, it will likely be not the greatest intelligence "failure" of modern history, nor the tens of thousands of dead bodies left in his wake, but the ascendancy of emotion in American political discourse, as logic and reason are buried with so many other opponents of the neocon agenda.
:scared :scared
..............................................................
yeh that was a great run there.
not to mention he essentially stole the election form Gore with all the chad bullshit , florida gov help, and supreme court lies and fabrications.
The worst President in American history. Close
What freakin' book is that?!??!
Wow......you hit two threads with the same line. Will have to wait for the BCS to do the math for me, but my guess is he wont be in the Top 50.......and that's with a very difficult strength of schedule.
I still don't get why you think a leader left of center means we will be overrun with "jihadists:shrug: "......(labeling whatever the fawk the "threat" is feels a little like when we used to have to try and spell Quaddaffi ... oops)
The world is a different place since 9/11........we know that even if we don't have Rudy Kazootie around anymore reminding uth. Do you really think it'll be a big lay down in 2 years with a Dem in the WH? As if this opens us up to another blow on that scale? We're all painfully aware of that possibility right now. We no longer have that sense of invincibility we used to wallow around in......no-one is going to negotiate more with these terrorists (read: saudis) than GW has done already. We're not fighting terrorists in Iraq, and if we've learned anything in the last 6 years, its that the old ways of "war" do no not apply to a de-centralized enemy. Even Mccain should remember that every time he tries to use that right arm.
.... but wtf has been done by this great man??? Dropped the ball in Afghanistan chasing the bogey man ( probably had some slick stuff on his hands from jerking off the Saudis).......botched the current quagmire to the tune of a trillion bucks........kept border security intact in its current state of nothingness.......bitch slapped the Constitution on so many levels I can't retype......one attempt at resolving health care resulted in a hundreds of millions boondoggle for Pharma.......stellar effort on the education front with "No Child Left Behind" .........and on and on and on and on........its been covered.
This has been a quickset for a multi-post KOD retaliation spike.
1.20.09 ---- whoever wins will be better.
