Another analysis of McCain: who is he really?

[Parabellum]

Originally Posted by RiverCityRebel

Parabellum - those articles you cite are all from the MSM. Therefore, they contain no fact and skew in Obama's direction by their very nature.

EDIT: Due to a severe system crash of my sarcasm detection unit, this post was entirely unnecessary, but I'll leave it up just for fun.

Excellent argument.

The entire media is biased toward Obama,

Therefore, any actual truth to the claims that McCain is running a dirty campaign (which is obvious to anyone with internet or cable) must surely be biased.

Your logic fails entirely.

Nice straw man argument though. You gonna run through Wikipedias list of logical fallacies and try them all until one works?

[RiverCityRebel]

Originally Posted by Parabellum

Excellent argument.

The entire media is biased toward Obama,

Therefore, any actual truth to the claims that McCain is running a dirty campaign (which is obvious to anyone with internet or cable) must surely be biased.

Your logic fails entirely.

Nice straw man argument though. You gonna run through Wikipedias list of logical fallacies and try them all until one works?

Your sarcasm detector on the fritz again?

[Parabellum]

Originally Posted by RiverCityRebel

Your sarcasm detector on the fritz again?

Yes, it is, sorry about that.

<- at me.

[ARozanski]

Originally Posted by RiverCityRebel

Wait, what? McCain broke down under torture and confessed?

Here is the Snopes entry:

snopes.com: War Crimes

snopes.com: War Crimes

War Crimes

Claim: John McCain declared during a 60 Minutes interview that he was a "war criminal" who "bombed innocent women and children."

Status: False.

Example: [Collected via e-mail, February 2008]

Is this true?

"I am a war criminal," McCain said on "60 Minutes" in 1997. "I bombed innocent women and children."

Origins: Arizona senator John McCain's background of service to his country is well-known: A U.S. Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, Lieut. Commander McCain was shot down in his
Skyhawk dive bomber while flying a mission over Hanoi, North Vietnam, on 26 October 1967. McCain was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (with fractures in his right leg and both arms, for which he received minimal care) and spent the next five-plus years enduring torture and brutality as a POW before being released following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in early 1973.

Given Senator McCain's reputation and status, first as a military officer and later as a member of Congress, many people would be rather surprised to learn that many years after the end of the Vietnam War, during an interview with a major news magazine, he supposedly declared himself to be a "war criminal" who "bombed innocent women and children."

John McCain did no such thing, however, and the claim that he did is a prime example of how important context is in understanding the meaning of one's statements.

As John McCain recalled shortly after his return from captivity, the pressure put upon him by his captors to acknowledge that he was a "war criminal" began almost immediately after he was taken prisoner:
For the next three or four days, I lapsed from conscious to unconsciousness. During this time, I was taken out to interrogation — which we called a "quiz" — several times. That's when I was hit with all sorts of war-criminal charges. This started on the first day. I refused to give them anything except my name, rank, serial number and date of birth. They beat me around a little bit. I was in such bad shape that when they hit me it would knock me unconscious. They kept saying, "You will not receive any medical treatment until you talk."

After I had been there about 10 days ... "The Cat" [a man in charge of all the POW camps in Hanoi] said — through an interpreter, as he was not speaking English at this time — "The French television man is coming." I said, "Well, I don't think I want to be filmed," whereupon he announced, "You need two operations, and if you don't talk to him, then we will take your chest cast off and you won't get any operations." He said, "You will say that you're grateful to the Vietnamese people, and that you're sorry for your crimes." I told him I wouldn't do that.
Nearly twenty-five years later, what Senator McCain said to Mike Wallace during an interview for a segment of the 60 Minutes news magazine (originally broadcast on 12 October 1997 and aired again on 6 June 1999) was not a personal declaration that he had been a "war criminal" who "bombed innocent women and children," but a lamentation that while a POW he had, under pain of torture, finally allowed his captors to coerce him into issuing a "confession" stating such. A transcript of the relevant portion of the 60 Minutes interview from 1997 shows that when McCain spoke the sentences "I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people" and "I intentionally bombed women and children," he was referring to the substance of a confession his North Vietnamese captors had forced him to write as wartime propaganda, not making a open admission of personal guilt:
WALLACE: (Voiceover) People who know McCain well say he can hold a grudge. He also has a legendary temper. But if McCain can be hard on his friends and even harder on his enemies, he can also be very hard on himself.

Sen. McCAIN: I m—made serious, serious mistakes and did things wrong when I was in prison, OK?

WALLACE: What did you do wrong in prison?

Sen. McCAIN: I wrote a confession. I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children.

WALLACE: And you did it because you were being tortured...

Sen. McCAIN: I...

WALLACE: ...and you'd reached the end of the line.

Sen. McCAIN: Yes. But I should have gone further. I should have — I — I never believed that I would — that I would break, and I did.
Last updated: 7 August 2008

The URL for this page is snopes.com: War Crimes

Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com.
This material may not be reproduced without permission.
snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.
Sources Sources:

Alexander, Paul. Man of the People: The Life of John McCain.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. ISBN 0-471-22829-X.

McCain, John. "John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account."
U.S. News & World Report. 14 May 1973.

60 Minutes. "The Maverick from Arizona."
12 October 1997.

[SlowGoose]

Originally Posted by RiverCityRebel

Your sarcasm detector on the fritz again?

HEY!!!!!!!!!!

[Mooosman]

Originally Posted by F&D

But it's a moot point, because McCain isn't even running a "dirty campaign"

Wait, what?


Most of McCain's ads have been proven to be outright LIES! His ad buys are now 100% for NEGATIVE ADS.

He has stopped talking about himself completely.

He is offering NO policy plans or his vision for the country.

He is JUST talking about Obama. He is offering no alternatives to any of Obama's plans, mind you, he's just trying to assassinate his character.



McCain is desperate, and he's trying to drag down as many people as he can. He has exactly 1 month left in national politics, and he knows it...


Nick

[Baldrick]

Originally Posted by F&D

What? Where did you get this from? Of course I'm not blaming the Obama campaign. Why wouldn't they let the media carry their water for them?

Right here, directly from you, ya moron:
"I thought he was naive in the first place to think that he could try to stay above it all while Obama's media lap dogs did all his dirty work."

[BusaDave]

Originally Posted by F&D

Actually, I'm not giving McCain a pass for lying. At most, he's guilty of naivete. In order for it to be a lie, you'd have to prove that he made this pledge to run a clean campaign with the willful intent to go back on it. There is no evidence to suggest this is the case.

So making a pledge and going back on it does not suggest willful?

[RiverCityRebel]

Originally Posted by ARozanski

Here is the Snopes entry:

snopes.com: War Crimes

So, yes.

No wonder he was against torture before he was for it.

Brings up an interesting point, though. Why would he support torture knowing it produces false confessions?

Unless, of course, his confession wasn't false, meaning he knows torture produces real confessions. Which would be great, except it would mean he really did commit war crimes.

Either way, he's a dick.

[User Name]

Originally Posted by F&D

At best this shows McCain to be a naive fool for believing that the mainstream media would do anything other than give Obama huge freaking pass on everything.

This is so much fun!!

[gospeed81]

Originally Posted by Mooosman

He has stopped talking about himself completely.

He is offering NO policy plans or his vision for the country.

He is JUST talking about Obama. He is offering no alternatives to any of Obama's plans, mind you, he's just trying to assassinate his character.

He has nothing to present, nothing the people really want, he just wants to show them what they don't want in a last ditch effort to stay in the game.

The states are solidifying for voting day, and Obama is WAY ahead.

Even that political slut Palin today was slamming Obama, the saddest part of it was the crowd. All these old white ladies scared witless of terrorism being fear-mongered into voting for those assclowns.

[bush]

Originally Posted by F&D

Actually, I'm not giving McCain a pass for lying. At most, he's guilty of naivete. In order for it to be a lie, you'd have to prove that he made this pledge to run a clean campaign with the willful intent to go back on it. There is no evidence to suggest this is the case.

But it's a moot point, because McCain isn't even running a "dirty campaign", there is just the incessant whining from you guys about how you don't want anyone to know who and what Obama is. McCain is just finally doing the job that the media should have done in vetting the other candidate. Don't the people have a right to know his background, history, and associations? McCain's campaign is only "dirty" in the sense that Obama's own past is dirty.

Wow. You haven't been paying attention at all, have you?

[flylooper]

McCain's handlers and McCain himself simply don't give a rip about truthfulness anymore.

It's come to the place where truth no longer matters. The order of the day is to throw up so much crap, generate so much fear, that it doesn't matter whether or not fact checking proves the lie. They are banking on at least some percentage of the lies "sticking" with the electorate.

As we go into the final days of the campaign, the lies and dirty tricks will become more and more fantasical, in cases so outrageous that no thinking person would give an iota of credence to them. But there is always a gaggle who will believe anything, and particularly anything political in order to justify deeply held prejudices.

We're gonna see fear, race and religion play a bigger part in these last days. Palin will lead the way. It will be interesting to see how McCain handles himself in this 2nd "debate." He will have to personally "go negative" with Obama because the issue Americans are now concerned with - economic issues - are something he has neither interest nor understanding of.

For the GOP, the issues of the day have gone out the window. They've nothing to run on and the desperation is setting is. Expect the worse. Expect the worse.

What we're learning is tha McCain has always been about McCain. He has no honor. He never has had any. He's a spolied, petulent son of two navy admirals who has never accomplished a thing on his own. Just like that other scion of wealth and privilege, George W. Bush.

[county]

McCain is a guy who really, really, really wants to be president. And he is willing to compromise much for this goal.

[Parabellum]

WOW, props to fly for using both "petulant" and "scion" in the same sentence.

Seriously, if you keep this up, you might set the bar too high for the P&R forum.