Obama Distorts at VFW

A guest blog by McCain 2008 National Veterans’ Director Lang Sias...

The warm reception Senator McCain received from the VFW demonstrates that veterans appreciate his long record on national security issues and his deep commitment to our nation's veterans.

I know other veterans share my disappointment that Barack Obama used the VFW’s National Convention as a forum for misrepresenting John McCain’s proposals to expand veterans’ benefits.

Senator Obama alleged that John McCain "wants to ration care so the VA only serves combat injuries, while everyone else gets an insurance card…privatization is just not the answer.” This is false.

John McCain made clear both in his speech to the VFW yesterday and to the Disabled American Veterans last week, that his Veterans’ Health Care Access Card would be an expansion of benefits. It would provide eligible veterans who do not currently have timely access to VA facilities the option of using high-quality health-care providers nearer to their homes. It would not force anyone to go to a non-VA facility. Nor would it ration health care based on whether injuries were combat/non-combat related. And it certainly would not privatize the VA.

Barack Obama also mischaracterized Senator McCain’s position on the “GI Bill For the 21st Century,” claiming that McCain opposed the bill because it was “too generous.” In fact, John McCain opposed the initial version of the bill because it failed to address the number one education request of career service members and their families--the freedom to transfer their benefits to a spouse or a child. It also did nothing to retain the young officers and enlisted leaders who form the backbone of our all-volunteer force. Once the bill was improved, Senator McCain was proud to support it.

John McCain could have done the politically expedient thing and just signed on to what he knew was flawed legislation. But instead he put country first and sought a better bill. As a result of his leadership, we now have legislation that better serves our military, better serves military families, and better serves the interests of our country.

Obama Talks Tough

Today Senator Obama criticized McCain for not echoing his own ill-advised comments on Pakistan:

So for all of his talk about following Osama bin Laden to the Gates of Hell, Senator McCain refused to join my call to take out bin Laden across the Afghan border. Instead, he spent years backing a dictator in Pakistan who failed to serve the interests of his own people.

Leave aside the fact that last August, after he first threatened to send troops across the Afhgan border, Obama clarified, saying "that we have to work with Musharraf." Also leave aside the fact that the Bush administration is already pursuing al Qaeda terrorists on the other side of the Afghan border with increasing frequency. Is Obama suggesting that he will change this country's policy with regard to high value targets in Pakistan?

Just a month ago in an interview with CBS correspondent Lara Logan:

LOGAN: "...if US forces had Osama bin Laden in its sights and the Pakistanis said no, that they wouldn't fire? They wouldn't go after him?"

OBAMA: "Oh, no, I think actually this is current doctrine. There was some dispute when I said this last August. Both the administration and some of my opponents suggested, well, you know, you shouldn't go around saying that. But I don't think there's any doubt that that should be our policy and will continue to be our policy."

LOGAN: "But it is the current policy."

OBAMA: "I believe it is the current policy."

LOGAN: "So there's no change then?"

OBAMA: "I don't think there's going to be a change there.

Another POW, Same Story

After a brief conversation with Col. Bud Day, I can confirm that Col. Day is most likely the toughest man alive in addition to being the most decorated Air Force veteran in history. Some of the details Day shared with the McCain Report are too gory to reproduce here, but he did confirm that "not long after we all got back together [in the camp]," McCain told him the story of the prison guard who drew a cross in the dirt one Christmas.

"We were bringing each other up to date, he was telling me how he [McCain] had been tortured," Day said. The guards had "busted his arm," and "John was complaining that they'd treated him like an animal." Day said "the only friendly thing the [guards] ever did was hit me on the leg instead of on the head." But, according to Day, McCain wouldn't condemn them all, telling the other men of the occasional act of decency he'd witnessed from his captors. Day says McCain told him how one of those guards had "made a cross with his foot and wiped it out."

Andrew Sullivan is sure that McCain is lying--and that the other men who served with him are lying as well--because McCain didn't tell this story to an appropriate media outlet at a time and place of Sullivan's choosing. But just imagine what Sullivan's response might look like if some right-wing blogger was challenging an element of Obama's biography, an element that could never be definitively proven or disproved, and which there was no reason to doubt beyond this or that circumstantial detail and an absence of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Bud Day's Medal of Honor citation after the jump...

Smears the Left Can Fight For

In the least credible and most vicious corner of the internet, liberal bloggers at the Daily Kos are accusing John McCain of plagiarizing from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The story Solzhenitsyn told was of a prisoner who drew a cross in the dirt in a Soviet Gulag. McCain's story is of a guard who drew a cross in the dirt in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

The only similarity between the two stories is a cross in the dirt, but it is hardly an unlikely coincidence that there were practicing Christians in both Russia and Vietnam, or that in the prisons of those two Communist countries the only crosses to be found were etched in the dirt, as easily disappeared as the Christians who drew them.

But those desperate to discredit Senator McCain's record will have to impugn his fellow prisoners as well. Orson Swindle, who was held as a prisoner of war along with McCain, tells the McCain Report that he heard this particular story from McCain "when we first moved in together." That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though "time blurred" and he couldn't be sure. He said it was some time around then that the Vietnamese moved all "36 troublemakers" into the same quarters, where they "talked about everything under the sun."

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others. John McCain has often said he witnessed a thousand acts of bravery while he was imprisoned, and though not every one has been submitted into the public record, they are remembered by the men who were there (one such only recently reported by Karl Rove though it escaped mention in any of Senator McCain's books). But as Swindle said, this is a "desperate group of people trying to make something out of nothing."

Not Mutually Exclusive

Jake Tapper writes:

The McCain campaign's vitriol against NBC's Andrea Mitchell is odder still when you consider that the McCain campaign's blogger Michael Goldfarb was quoting her very same reporting approvingly as evidence that the Obama campaign was a bunch of whiners.

I think my tone was neutral, but regardless, this campaign does not question the accuracy of Mitchell's reporting. We question whether it was appropriate to repeat this allegation unquestioningly as Mitchell did.

After all, Mitchell can accurately report that the Obama campaign is whining about their candidate's poor performance and yet still fail to uphold the basic standards of her profession. By repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated in last night's forum, that's precisely what she did. And if Mitchell is simply in the business of parroting campaign spin, we'd be happy to share ours with her before next week's episode of Meet the Press.