HAT TIP TO YOU AS WELL! 

I couldn't believe what I was reading on Sunday when I discovered this article. I actually had to put the Times Magazine down, put on my jacket and go for a walk for fear I might break something.

This is probably the first article that I read in a major news pub. where they've gone this far to marginalize McCain's service and time spent in the Hanoi Hilton. While McCain was having his shoulders seperated, Kerry was marching against people like McCain and the military and comparing them to Ghengis Kahn.

What's next? Will they begin to insinuate that McCain, because he was the son of an Admiral, that that makes him military royality? That he wasn't like the ordinary, middle class grunt?

Mr.L

"...says [Max] Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh."

Did he really lose his limbs during the battle of Khe Sanh?  I heard a different story. 

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

-Ronald Reagan

That someone apparently read or was forced to read Hagel's book. Let's just say it's not exactly a best seller. Not that Reason did all that great of a job reviewing it, as comments here, including but not limited to mine, make clear.
JMR

The tax & spend drug war looks racist in the real world.

I think Cleland lost his limbs in an accident with a grenade. I'd research this to be sure, but I am not sure where I'd get the straight story and where I'd get the revised "hero" history.

Essentially this writer's view deligitimizes anyone that was not involved directly in Vietnam in making any judgement on the conflict. Otherwise how could an average Joe or Jane Blow that didn't serve in Vietnam have any more legitimacy that McCain who actually served in country and then, of course, was captured and confined to inhumane conditions for all those years, in choosing the "truth" of Vietnam. What John McCain didn't see on the battlefield while in captivity he learned subsequently from contemporary news sources/books just like those that didn't serve.

I don't believe this is an example of muddled thinking but a conscious attempt to deligitimize McCain who of course has served on the Armed Intelligence Committee for years, took part in an official review of the conflict, and has visited since several times.

This constant shifting standard where at certain times one needs to have served to be considered able to legitimately comment on military issues and then in a heartbeat switches to no experience necessary if, say, you are Barack Obama, Hillary or Bill Clinton, is intellectually dishonest. It's the same rationale that covers anti-war protests by middle schoolers and takes their every anti-war comment/quote as the peak of enlightenment. Pure poppycock.

This is strange. I was there before and after Kerry was, and for much longer than he was, and I never did the things Kerry accused me of, nor do I "share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry". Of course, there were very, very few veterans like Kerry. As a matter of fact, VVAW members are few and far between these days. Well, actual Vietnam veterans, anyway. As a matter of fact, less than .1 percent of 1.0 percent of members of that group were, in fact, Vietnam veterans.

 Save a SeAL, club a liberal!!

In trying to understand McCain, Bai tries to pidgeon-hole him in the traditional liberal way.  Since Kerry, Hagel, Cleland, and Webb are against the Iraq War, then it goes to follow that McCain should be, too.  But he's not.

So, what makes him different?  Oh, it just has to be the 5 years in captivity, which left him deranged, or as at least as Cleland suggest, "didn't see the ground war up close" to really appreciate it.

But Bai's argument is counter-intuitive.  If McCain had merely been a strike pilot delivering ordnance from hundreds, even thousands of feet above the ground, he could argue that McCain say the war from a different prospective than Kerry, Hagel, Cleland, et al.

But McCain was A PRISONER OF WAR IN ONE OF THE MOST HELLISH CAPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS EVER EXPERIENCED BY AMERICAN SERVICEMEN.  For yeaers, he was locked in isolation from fellow Americans and tortured.  He had to have gone through a lot of soul-searching during that period, to find meaning to what they were being subjected to, and how to deal with it.  He and his fellow POWs had to bolster each other at their darkest hours. 

FOR FIVE YEARS. Mr. Bai!  Never knowing when or if he'd be repatriated.  Coming home after donig his best to a country that neither celebrated nor appreciated his personal sacrifice.

Wouldn't a human being who survived that ordeal be LESS supportive of war? 

What "Dr." Bai is doing is excusing McCain's position on the war in Iraq by wrongly attributing it to trauma-induced psychological injury.

Sen McCain was deprived of his freedom in a POW camp and exposed to socialist/communist methods of torture. Sens Kerry, Web and Hagel were free and exposed to the socialist/communist propaganda via their liberal associates the US media.

And then there's this comment by Mr Bai, "...Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy..."

I think he's on to something.

So they won't buy "Reporting for Duty!" from McCain, eh?

The lesson of Viet Nam was that if you let the enemy dictate policy through subversive protest movements, you lose.

Matt Bai attempting to explain McCain's 5 years as a POW makes about as much sense as a kindergartener with a wet diaper trying to explain how to fly an A-4 Skyhawk off a carrier. He is obviously out of his league and has absolutely no knowledge about these things.

McCain is qualified to expound on the experiences of being a POW for 5 years. He lived it. Matt Bai might be qualified to tell us about his experiences wearing women's undergarments, but that's about it.

Yeah. Unlike War Hero Kerry's FOUR MONTHS IN VIETNAM, McCain spent all his years of imprisonment, especially 'the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away' in a cozy little bamboo cage. When he wasn't getting his teeth kicked out.

And unlike Kerry who probably spent most of his time figuring out ways to injure himself just enough to get to that magic #3 Purple Heart and a ticket on the next boat out of Vietnam, McCain and other  downed pilots obviously learned nothing from getting shot out of the sky at 10,000 ft.