I've been behind on reading my Time magazines recently. I just got done reading an article about how defending his personal, his family's and his country's honor is the driving force behind McCain. This is a theme he hammers over and over in touting his push of the surge to achieve "victory" in Iraq so America can honor our troops sacrifice, etc. There are many things I find disturbing with this logic so I thought I'd spell them out and try to stimulate a debate on his rationale.
1.) When we were attacked on 9/11, the right thing to do would be to defend our "honor" by bringing to justice the terrorists who committed this act. We rightfully aimed our guns on al Qaeda and the Taliban, but then turned them on Iraq, which had nothing to do with this. This drastically reduced the resources to follow this mission to the end.
2.) McCain's push for the Iraq war was ill-informed at the least and deceptive at worst. The honorable thing to do is admit a mistake or deception. After all, there is plenty of video available to anyone who cares to show this. What we get instead him sending in more and more troops to try to win a war he screwed us into.
3.) Everyone knows the story by now of how the Bush 2000 campaign deliberately misled the voters of South Carolina into thinking his adopted Indian daughter was a mixed race child born out of wedlock. Has he ever demanded a public apology from Bush on this? His family's and especially his daughter's honor were dragged through the mud, yet he hired the very same people to run the same type of campaign against Obama. The same people also distorted John Kerry's military record. This should be the ultimate affront to the honor of a fellow veteran, but we hear nothing.
4.) How come he hasn't made his attack dog, Sarah Palin, apologize for dishonoring the very people serving a cause greater than themselves, Community Organizers. Instead, this terrible meme has been repeated in his company. Obama could have took a much higher paying job given his level of academic acheivement, but instead actually lived the calling McCain sounded off in his acceptance speech.
The list of contradictions and hypocrisies is staggering and he must be made to justify or apologize for them as any "honorable" man would.