By Ron Beasley
In spite of saying he doesn't like to talk about it John McCain talks about his POW experience non stop and his campaign is now using it as an excuse for everything. When Maureen Dowd is hot she's hot - when she's not (most of the time) she's not. Well, today she's hot as she talks about John McCain and his POW excuse.
So it�s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength � and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he�s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience � by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain�s character had been �tested and forged in ways few can fathom.�
When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a �cone of silence� while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, �The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.�
When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, �This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years � in prison.�
As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: �The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was �Dancing Queen� by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music �stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.� �Dancing Queen,� however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain�s plane was shot down.�
The media is noticing and just as important so are his fellow veterans and POWs as the clip below demonstrates:
When his war hero currency becomes worth even less than the US dollar what else will McCain have going for him? Not much, and as Dowd points out it may get people to start asking the right questions.
The real danger to the McCain crew in overusing the P.O.W. line so much that it�s a punch line is that it will give Obama an opening for critical questions:
While McCain�s experience was heroic, did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to U.S. military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, �We are all Georgians,� mentality?
Another question people should be asking: will he use the POW experience as an excuse when he makes a mess of things as President?
The "a verb, a noun, and POW" line is dynamite, but it's one of those things that should be introduced in the MSM by a Democrat who's a POW himself. If the Democrats are smart, they should be working really hard behind the scenes to find a Democratic POW who will use that expression on CNN.
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