Fascinoma

Mere seconds after he effusively (and in my book excessively) praised Saint John McSame's war 'heroism' Wesley Clark said something so simply sensible that it shouldn't even draw attention. "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

But in the minds of right wingers and their many ass-licking lackeys on the networks, this is crazy talk, some kind of kamikaze attack on the self-evident superiority of McCain's national defense savvy. Somebody in the Obama camp might point out the tactical brillliance McCain' apparently came to in the Hanoi Hilton led him to support attaching Iraq with predictions like, "The success will be fairly easy," and "We can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period." (True enough, if like DcBrain, you think of hundred year wars as reasonable.) Of course McCain has since added to his incisive grasp of the situation through his many junkets to the Green Zone after which he declares thing like, "The neighborhoods are safe," and "Al Qaeda is going back into Iran." (Even Lieberman had to call him on that last bullshit.) Still, despite his shaky grasp of conditions and probabilities, it remains completely heretical (almost literally, to hear Fox News tell it, Thought Crime) to even begin to question Saint John's judgment in these matters.

It is further evidence of the sentimental infanitilization of the supposed adults who shape opinion and policy in this country: they all seem to believe that every person who puts on the uniform and gets off the truck is a hero, and that all these heroes come back from the noble wars, annealed in the crucible of combat, man into Real Men, schooled into wisdom by war's hard knocks. People with actual experience of actual soldiers will certainly know that few are heroes, and that many come back from war even sadder and more confused (traumatized, disoriented, addicted, brutal etc) than when they went away.