Patton is hoping that people will forget that when it came to the most important foreign policy decision of the decade, McCain was wrong and Obama was right.

So when he's criticized for something stupid like flag pins he's not allowed to call them out on it? He's just supposed to sit there? Why?


I never remember him referring to himself like that...

... it's usually just Republicans who are unhappy that they can't even get their party base behind their own candidate...


I guess you'd be happier if Obama didn't try running for president?

It might be the best chance McCain has...

No. Cause idiots out there think you have to LOOK patriotic in order to BE patriotic.

I don't wear a flag pin nor do I serve in the US armed forces, but I'd like some hook-toothed ignoramous to tell me I'm not patriotic... even though that idiot probably couldn't tell me the 3 branches of government... let alone how they interact. If Obama even knows that much (and I'm pretty sure he knows more then that) than he's got an edge on 41% of the population.

More:

- More than half of Americans don't know the number of Senators
- 1 out of 6 believe that the Constitution establishes America as a Christian nation
- 20% believe that only lawyers can understand the Constitution
- Almost one-quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed to us by the First Amendment
- 84% believe that the U.S. Constitution is the document that states that "all men are created equal", thus confusing it with the Declaration of Independence.

... It's almost no wonder Michelle Obama isn't proud of her country. These stats don't make me feel proud...

No candidate (and I'm not even talking about Obama) can run on the important things anymore cause we're all to crazy about proving patratism with some myopic definition. Both candidates have to dumb down there image because the majority of Americans only care about how they look!

It's maddening!


What's that supposed to mean?


So I guess it was fine when Republicans were doing it to Kerry?

I honestly can't wrap my brain around the GOP. I honestly can't. It's hypocracy incarnate.

You might want to take that up with the empty suit......HE'S the one who had the "Lookey At Me....I'm A Patriot Too" press conference.......HE'S the one worried Americans might not think HE'S patriotic.......because HE'S the one not wearing flag pins....HE'S the one not following simple civilian flag protocol.......LOL.....

 

Good thing your not running to be a wartime President.......


There you liberals go again.........


What part you not understand?

The part where I said it was OK for him to run....or the part where I said you could run also.....or the part where I said you are about as qualified to be President as the empty suit?


An entire organization of Vietnam Vets banded together against Kerry because he did alot of things against their cause back here at home....going on Dick Cavitt and denigrating the mission many had lost their lives over while the conflict was STILL GOING ON....that and his book "The New Soldier" and his Senate Fulbright testimony were used as enemy propoganda.....if you were still fughting a war....and some guy was safe back here in the US denigrating your mission....giving the enemy comfort with the knowledge there is a wave of dissention back home by soldiers themselves....throwing medals over the US Capitol fence.....how might you feel?

If ANY of the guys who were with him ran for President, I'm sure they'd get the same scrutiny.

If you have a problem with how other soldiers feel about Kerrys antiwar activities....and you don't believe it is an issue.....you take it up with them, OK?.......For the record....John McCain said something used for enemy propoganda also....but he wasn't safe back here at home....and it has been a part of his record that Americans have come to understand and forgive him for under his circumstances.....but you go ahead and join the circle-jerk and spit on him to and tell me how well that works for the empty suit.

I've always thought Kerry lost because he's a lefty liberal......Obama makes him look like Jerry Falwell.....


If you honestly believe the two are the same.....let's discuss what John Kerry was doing from October 26, 1967 to March 14, 1973, OK?

-Kerry's first tour of duty was as an ensign on the guided missile frigate USS Gridley in 1968..... a six-month turnaround, and spent most of a four month deployment on rescue station in the Gulf of Tonkin, standing by to pick up downed aviators."

By this time, John McCain has:

Graduated from flight school in 1960...became a naval pilot of ground-attack aircraft.....then stationed in A-1 Skyraider squadrons on the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and USS Enterprise...in December 1966 was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal flying A-4 Skyhawks....McCain's combat duty began in summer 1967, Forrestal was assigned to a bombing campaign during the Vietnam War....By then a lieutenant commander, McCain was almost killed on July 29, 1967 when he was near the center of the Forrestal fire. He escaped from his burning jet and was trying to help another pilot escape when a bomb exploded....McCain was struck in the legs and chest by fragments.....With the Forrestal out of commission, McCain volunteered for assignment with the USS Oriskany....on October 26, 1967,he was flying his twenty-third bombing mission over North Vietnam, when his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a missile over Hanoi, he fractured both arms and a leg, and then nearly drowned, when he parachuted into Trúc Bạch Lake in Hanoi. After he regained consciousness, a crowd attacked him, crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and bayoneted him; he was then transported to Hanoi's main Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton"....he spent six weeks in the hospital while receiving marginal care.Now having lost 50 pounds (23 kg), in a chest cast, and with his hair turned white, McCain was sent to a different camp on the outskirts of Hanoi in December 1967, into a cell with two other Americans who did not expect him to live a week. In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he would remain for two years.....

John Kerry:
-On June 20, 1968, he left the Gridley for Swift boat training at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado.

-On November 17, 1968, Kerry reported for duty at Coastal Squadron 1 in Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam.

-His first command was Swift boat PCF-44, from December 6, 1968 to January 21, 1969, when the crew was disbanded.

-On January 22, 1969, Kerry and several other officers had a meeting in Saigon with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the commander of U.S. Naval forces in Vietnam, and U.S. Army General Creighton Abrams

-During the night of December 2, 1968 and early morning of December 3, 1968, Kerry was in charge of a small boat operating near a peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay together with a Swift boat (PCF-60). According to Kerry and the two crewmen who accompanied him that night, Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis, they surprised a group of men unloading sampans at a river crossing, who began running and failed to obey an order to stop. As the men fled, Kerry and his crew opened fire on the sampans and destroyed them, then rapidly left. During this encounter, Kerry received a minor wound in the left arm above the elbow. It was for this injury that Kerry received his first Purple Heart.[19]

-Kerry received his second Purple Heart for a wound received in action on the Bo De River on February 20, 1969. The plan had been for the Swift boats to be accompanied by support helicopters. On the way up the Bo De, however, the helicopters were attacked. They returned to their base to refuel and were unable to return to the mission for several hours.......but like several others wounded earlier that day, he did not lose any time off from duty.[21][22]

-February 28, 1969, came the events for which Kerry was awarded his Silver Star. On this occasion, Kerry was in tactical command of his Swift boat...Going a short distance farther, Kerry's boat was the target of an RPG round; as the boat beached at the site, a VC with a rocket launcher jumped and ran from a spider hole. While the boat's gunner opened fire, wounding the VC on the leg, and while the other boats approached and offered cover fire, Kerry jumped from the boat and chased the VC and killed him, capturing a loaded rocket launcher.[23][24][24]

-March 13, 1969, five Swift boats were returning to base together on the Bay Hap river from their missions that day, after a firefight earlier in the day (during which time Kerry received a slight shrapnel wound in the buttocks from blowing up a rice bunker)........a mine or rocket exploded close to the boat. According to the documentation for the event, Kerry's arm was injured when he was thrown against a bulkhead during the explosion. PCF 94 returned to the scene and Kerry rescued Rassmann from the water. Kerry received the Bronze Star for his actions during this incident; he also received his third Purple Heart.[27]

-After Kerry's third qualifying wound, he was entitled per Navy regulations to re-assignment away from combat duties. Navy records show that Kerry's preferred choice for re-assignment was as an aide in Boston, New York or Washington, D.C.[28]

-On March 26, 1969, after a final patrol the night before, Kerry was transferred to Cam Ranh Bay to await his orders.

-On April 11, 1969, he reported to the Brooklyn-based Atlantic Military Sea Transportation Service

*John McCain in solitary confinement at Hanoi Hilton during John Kerry's ENTIRE service related to Vietnam*

In August of 1968, a program of severe torture began...he was subjected to repeated beatings and rope bindings, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery.....After four days, McCain made an anti-American propaganda "confession".....He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable....but as he would later write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine"......His injuries left him permanently incapable of raising his arms above his head....He subsequently received two to three beatings per week because of his continued refusal to sign additional statements.....


John Kerry:
- January, 1970, he requested early discharge in order to run for Congress the following fall. He was discharged from active duty on March 1, 1970.


On April 22, 1971, Kerry became the first Vietnam veteran to testify before Congress about the war, when he appeared before a Senate committee hearing on proposals relating to ending the war.

-The day after this testimony, Kerry participated in a demonstration with 800 other veterans in which he and other veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence at the front steps of the United States Capitol building to dramatize their opposition to the war.

-Kerry appeared more than once on The Dick Cavett Show on ABC television. On one Cavett program (June 30, 1971), in debating John O'Neill, Kerry argued that some of the policies instituted by the U.S. military leaders in Vietnam, such as free-fire zones and burning noncombatants' houses, were contrary to the laws of war.

-May 29, 1971, was the occasion for Kerry's only arrest, when the participants tried to camp on the village green in Lexington. At 2:30 a.m. on May 30, 1971, local and state police awoke and arrested 441 demonstrators, including Kerry, for trespassing.

-June 6, 1971), he recounted how he and other Swift boat officers had become disillusioned by the contrast between what the leaders told them and what they saw

-In February 1972, after Kerry previously passed on an opportunity to run in another district, his wife, Julia bought a house in Worcester. Residence there would have required Kerry to run for Congress..........After Kerry's 1972 defeat, he and his wife bought a house in Lowell. He spent some time working as a fundraiser for the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), an international humanitarian organization

From late 1969 on, treatment of McCain and many of the other POWs became more tolerable, while McCain continued to be an active resister against the camp authorities. McCain and other prisoners cheered the B-52-led U.S. "Christmas Bombing" campaign of December 1972 as a forceful measure to push North Vietnam to terms.

John Kerry:
-In September 1973, he entered Boston College Law School.

Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years. He was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973.

McCain refused to meet with various anti-war groups seeking peace in Hanoi, wanting to give neither them nor the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory.
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Too bad John McCain is not running against John Kerry.....the service period here speaks volumes.....

But McCain is running against Barack Obama......shall we discuss his whereabouts from October 26, 1967 to March 14, 1973?

Keep it up guys........you're a hoot!

And Patton? Any more red herrings to toss out or list about McCain's military service? There is no question about whether he served. No question his POW status was a factor in his service. Most political junkies who participate on forums are more than familiar with that history, both the positives and negatives related to his military career because he has used it for the basis for election, reelection and based his total political career on it.

The bottom line is not about the past, but instead about the future.  Truth be known it isn't even about the amount
of political experience between the two candidates who at this time are both the presumptive nominees of their
respective parties and the statements both have made related to both domestic and foreign policy issues.

While you continue, as McCain does, to support the continuations of a variety of military occupations and perhaps and expansion of them into another preemptive war, should the person elected in November listen to the voice of
the people or listen to the voices of the DOD, past and present leadership, there when even the statements by
those who lead or have lead that cabinet level agency remain a mixed bag related to future foreign policy and
military matters?  The people, if you will, have clearly spoken and by large majorities want an end to the military
adventures, in specific, the one in Iraq.

Many also agree that such continuation is a massive factor in the condition of the domestic economy.  It is hardly
an unrelated factor.  In the end, both candidates have distinctive and different plans for the future.  The power
of the religious right is an extraneous issue, perhaps, important to you on a personal level, but hardly relevant
when one considers the overall economic future of the nation and its people.

So while you continue to dwell on that factor as well as the difference in McCain and Obama's military service, or
lack of it, and the media created issues of the various "pastors," in the end they are like McCain's service, just
red herrings and a continuation of the trivialization of such factors by the MSM that has continued with posts of this sort and the various minutia here.

Elections, when related to the economic circumstances large numbers of those in the U.S. are currently facing, are often decided on the policies expounded by the two major parties and decided not from the speeches from the pulpit, the attempt to create heroic images of one candidate or the other, but around the kitchen table on Main Street, rather than in the board rooms on Wall Street, or even the emanations of the DOD generals. While I could
be wrong, I suspect that will be the basis this election is decided on.  Voters will decide if they want more of the
same economic policies and practices that have left them personally in their present condition or want to gamble
on changes that could make a difference in their personal futures. 

In the end, all of the minutia that continues related to the personal positives and negatives of the presumptive
candidates may mean little.  The election season, one IMHO that has been one created far too early, once the
conventions in late August and early September are over, after Labor Day the voting public  may become engaged in the real issues and by November choose the Party they most trust to move them into a more positive future.

At this point all these discussions remain just fodder for the MSM and those such as thee and me who are participants on forums such as this one, making the statements you continue to dwell on such as military and
religious factors moot.
 

   

I think "McCain is a war vet!" will work about as well as "Kerry is a war vet!" Neither party's base can/could get much behind their respective war vets. That war is the past. No one cares. McCain is the Republican Kerry, unfocused, uncompelling, his greatest achievements behind him.

I didn't define anything...I merely asked a question....can you answer it?


You're smarter than this Abrax.....there is a reason "specific" was italicized.....you understand sub-contexts, do you not?

Try to read and understand the written word as it exists....I wrote exactly what was meant to be said.

Not all "protests" or "complaints" are equal.

If you have specifics....I will be glad to discuss them with you.