Hesiod just posted a diary entitled "Attack John McCain’s CHARACTER or Lose" - http://www.dailykos.com/... Hesiod is absolutely correct. The Obama campaign is ceding the character issue to McCain, and McCain is taking full advantage of it. "I was a POW" has become McCain’s refrain to every criticism. It’s become the fulcrum of his entire campaign.
Obama can’t touch this, we know that. But as Rove taught us, he doesn’t have to. All Obama needs to do is let it be known that the dollars should start flowing to Vietnam Vets Against John McCain - http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjoh... - and ads excoriating McCain for alleged collaboration with the North Vietnamese will begin to run all over the nation. Obama can stand back, abhor the ads, laud McCain’s service, but the ads, like the Swift Boat ads in 2004, will erode McCain’s reputation, drive up his negatives, and put him squarely on the defensive.
The beauty of this is that unlike the Swift Boat campaign, every allegation against McCain would be true, and would be corroborated by McCain’s own accounts of his captivity, the credible accounts of other POWs, and the contemporaneous press reports from the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s.
McCain, like Kerry during the 2004 campaign, is refusing to release his military records. Kerry was crucified for this by the right in 2004. McCain is currently getting a pass. McCain’s failure to sign Form 180 releasing his military records should be a major issue. Let’s see those Navy records. The Navy has released only 19 pages of information that doesn’t require McCain’s authorization. There are hundreds of pages of military records McCain won’t release. Furthermore, he has urged the Vietnamese to block any release of materials (such as the tapes of McCain calling the U.S. a war criminal).
McCain's military records would explain why McCain, unlike other military officers held as POWs in Vietnam, was not granted promotions during his captivity. It was the policy of the army, navy and other U.S. forces to grant promotions to officers held as POWs, but McCain left Hanoi with the same Lt. Comm. Rank he held when taken prisoner. James Stockdale, for example, was a Commander when he was captured. He was promoted to captain while in captivity, and then promptly promoted to Rear Admiral upon his release. John McCain remained a Lt. Commander until 1979. For twelve years during his captivity in Vietnam and after, he remained a Lt. Commander. It is extraordinary that a former POW, graduate of Annapolis, the son and grandson of Admirals, would still be Lt. Commander at the age of 43. And yet McCain wasn’t granted a promotion to Captain until 1979.
The reasons for the Navy’s decision to deny McCain promotion are obvious and are part of the public record. McCain cooperated with his Viet captors, in violation of the Military Code of Conduct, and began doing so four days after his capture. He was not tortured. He was not coerced. He volunteered military information, disclosure of which was prohibited by the Military Code of Conduct, in exchange for treatment at a Viet civilian hospital – a privilege not accorded to other POWs. McCain admitted all of this in an article in U.S. News & World Report in 1973. http://www.usnews.com/...
They wanted military rather than political information at this time. Every time they asked me something, I'd just give my name, rank and serial number and date of birth.
I think it was on the fourth day that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football. I remembered that when I was a flying instructor a fellow had ejected from his plane and broken his thigh. He had gone into shock, the blood had pooled in his leg, and he died, which came as quite a surprise to us—a man dying of a broken leg. Then I realized that a very similar thing was happening to me.
When I saw it, I said to the guard, "O.K., get the officer." An officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as "The Bug." He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with. I said, "O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."
McCain then proceeded, over the succeeding months and years of his captivity, to accuse his country of war crimes, recording numerous filmed confessions for the Vietnamese. This was deeply humiliating to the Navy. It was a scandal here in the States. On June 5, 1969 the New York Daily News published an article titled "Reds Say PW Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral." While Stockdale and other officers who had stubbornly resisted their captors attempts to cooperate in the North Vietnamese propaganda campaign were promoted, McCain was not.
Unlike the Swift Boaters, these charges regarding McCain are part of the public record. McCain’s efforts to block release of information relating to his captivity is detailed not by demonstrated liars like O’Neill and Thurlow, but by former ‘pub Senator Bob Smith and former ‘pub congressman Bob Dornan. Their charges, as well as charges made by former POWs who detail McCain’s collaboration, are all over YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/...
The military records would also reveal whether, as McCain claims, he was in line for a Rear Admiral promotion when he left the military in 1981. He recently told the NYT that he turned down this promotion. McCain’s claim is laughable. McCain had achieved Captain rank less than two years before. Former Senators William Cohen and Gary Hart, each of whom served as groomsmen at McCain’s wedding, confirmed that the left the military because he knew he wouldn’t be promoted to Admiral. Rear Admirals Peter Booth and John Batzler, who were promoted in 1981, deny that McCain was considered for promotion. Each point out that a promotion to Admiral less than two years after promotion to Captain would have been extraordinary even for men who, like them, had a record of steady advancement. For someone like McCain, who languished for virtually his entire military career as a Lt. Commander, it would have been unprecedented. Jeffrey Klein detailed McCain's deception at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Perhaps the most damning account of McCain’s collaboration comes from John Dramesi, who was with McCain at Camp Unity, a POW camp. Dramesi wrote a book, "Code Of Honor", which described the collaborationist behavior of many of the senior ranking officers (SRO’s) at Camp Unity.
Dramesi’s account has the benefit of having been published in 1975. McCain was still a nobody, and Dramesi therefore can’t be accused of attempting to Swift Boat McCain. McCain is a peripheral figure in Dramesi’s account, meriting only four or five mentions. But McCain figures most prominently in Dramesi’s account of the shameful attempt by many SROs to squelch any attempts at resistance. The following are passages from the book "Voices of the Vietnam POWs" describing Dramesi’s account of his anger at senior ranking officers at Camp Unity who discouraged escape attempts and agitation. "Voices of the Vietnam POWs" can be found here in Google Books: http://books.google.com/...
Dramesi is most heretical when he describes many senior POWs, including some "princes of the realm". Though he "was still looking for that common fiber that good men possess" as late as 1971, by then he knew that neither family background, nor university education, nor time at a military academy, nor skill as a pilot guaranteed integrity.
There’s no mistaking who Dramesi was describing here. McCain was not the only pilot at Camp Unity. He was not the only graduate of a military academcy at Camp Unity. But there was only pilot from from a military academy with a storied family background who was a "prince of the realm". It was John McCain, whose nickname at Camp Unity was "the Crown Prince." Lest there be any doubt, Dramesi gets more specific when he criticizes McCain for advocating a policy that Dramesi and other POWs considered collaborationist.
Dramesi’s most disillusioning period of captivity began on Christmas Day 1970, when the POWs moved into Camp Unity. Most narratives rush through this last period. Since Dramesi devotes over a third of his memoir to it, Code of Honor is one of the most detailed accounts of what Dramesi considered Camp Conformity or Camp Surrender. Leadership in a POW compound is always a touchy matter. According to A.J. Barker, "Strict military discipline cannot work because it is too easily equated with the enemy – Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese – orders," and Draemesi certainly accused many POW leaders of doing the Camp Authority’s work for it. He had always been impatient with what POW Tim Kirk described as his earliest wish: "All I wanted to do was to sit in the corner of the cell, and I didn’t give a damn if that door never opened. All I wanted them to do was to leave me alone." When senior officers who in Dramesi’s opinion had behaved in this way during the bad times started to reclaim their commands and privileges in Camp Unity, he was furious: "Here we were in prison, forty-seven strong, still being intimidated by the North Vietnamese, now doing to ourselves those things they had failed to force upon individuals. Could it be that those who had failed so miserably were not to determine our conduct?" A few senior officers resisted the shift. When the POW command rejected Dramesi’s escape request, Jim Stockdale sent him the message that "I have done everything I could to help you. Sorry I could not swing it. I know you tigers deserve the opportunity." For the most part, though, the highest-ranking men implemented what John McCain called "a whole new concept for resisting" which strongly suppressed agitation or individual initiative. The effect on escapes was so devastating that Dramesi could only agree when George McKnight remarked that "when we get out of here, if someone were to ask me, ‘What was the greatest obstacle to escape?’ my only reply can be ‘our own leaders.’ "
"A whole new concept for resisting", according to McCain, one which involved discouraging escape attempts and any attempts at agitation. Dramesi also noticed that these very same SROs were the most intent on absolving themselves.
These same commanders also seem dedicated to erasing before returning home any distinctions between POW’s performances. Soft-linerRichard Stratton predicted to his hard-liner friend Dramesi that "you’ll be surprised who the good soldiers are going to be. Everybody’s going to a be a good soldier. And everybody will be so tired of the Vietnam War and the POW issue that the question of resistance won’t even be brought up. We’ll all be part of one big group."
Years later McCain would infuriate the families of POWs and MIAs by leading the fight to seal POW records, thus assuring that his shame would be concealed, but also impeding the work of POW advocacy groups to get a full accounting of their loved ones. These POW advocacy groups remain very bitter about McCain's efforts to shut down the flow of information from Vietnam regarding American POWs. Why are there views of McCain not being exploited? Why are we not seeing ads in which the parents, siblings and children of Vietnam era POWs and MIAs criticize McCain for blocking a full accounting of the fate of these POWs and MIAs?
There are things in those records McSame doesn’t want us to see. We know there is information in McCain’s military records that will be embarrassing. We know that McCain’s participation in North Vietnamese propaganda efforts was considered scandalous at the time, as evidenced by the UPI’s "POW Songbird" reference and the Navy’s conspicuous refusal to promote McCain.
The ads against McCain could point out that he Vietnamese know what these things are. An ominous voiceover could ask whether we really want a president who is susceptible to blackmail by a foreign power.
I hate this kind of politics, and I know most Kossacks do as well. But we haven’t made the rules. The republican Slime Machine and its media megaphone made the rules. We can play by those rules, and pat ourselves on the back for our high-minded idealism, but McCain, Rove and their minions will beat the crap out of us. In my mind, we have no choice. McCain is going to shout REZKO and AYRES no matter what Obama does, and no matter what we do. The only choice here is whether we fight back.