The Mercenary’s Cookbook

Sure, we aren’t seeing the Iraq War on the news so much these days, but politicians are looking for every possible opportunity to wrap themselves in your uniforms, and use your bravery to make any policy of their’s beyond criticism, because to criticize them is to criticize you brave soldiers, who have given so much so that they can pass their farm subsidies for ethanol to decrease our reliance on foreign oil. To be against corn is to spit in the face of all you fight for, the blood you’ve shed, the comrades you’ve lost. Can you look them in the eye and say their friends died for nothing and vote against corn? 

It’s not coming. It’s been here since the first boots hit Afghanistan. You’re sacrifices have been used for six years to ensure the attachment of endless riders and pork barrel projects, keeping the world safe for research into the potential of pig farts to ween us from the petrol of the Middle East. What un-American would say this is a war for oil? Just listen to the pols, and you know it’s a war for a new feeder road to I-10 in case the terrorists bomb the Port of Houston. They’ve wrapped themselves in your uniforms they never wore for you, dear friends. This multi-million dollar defense contract for a liscensed masseuse was for you. What patriotic American could deny you their millions?

Now, the Presidential campaign is under way, and it’s all about you. The Obama campaign wants to make the case that we ought to have a good reason to leave you in harms way, and that you have done your jobs, and it’s time for you to come home because it’s now up to the politicians to make it work. McCain wants to make the case that having been in war, we will finally win this thing some time after his re-election so you can come home victors. Then maintain a military presence, they way we keep you in Korea.

Yes, everyone knows you want what they want, and that for your sakes, we should stop denying you and give it to them.

Turns out, what you want isn’t nearly as clear cut as they would make it. Some recent surveys show the steady trend toward the Republican Party among military families since Vietnam may be reversing course:

 

A Los Angeles Times survey of 1,467 people, including 631 soldiers, veterans and their families, in late 2007 found that 57 percent of military respondents believed the Iraq war was not worth fighting — nearly the same as the overall population (60 percent).

Asked which party they trusted most to handle important issues, the military families chose Democrats over Republicans 39-35 percent, compared to a 39-31 percent ratio among the general population.

In its annual reader surveys, the Military Times specialist news group found Bush’s approval rate among the military had plummeted from 60 percent in 2005 to just 48 percent in 2007.

No doubt Obama will use this to claim you want to leave. And some of you do.  No doubt, this won’t keep McCain from claiming that as a former POW, he is you, and therefore what he wants is what you want. And some of you do. Truth is, you’re pretty evenly split right now. 

That won’t keep them from making you out to be some monolithic voice. Take a look at the dustup over the weekend about Clark’s criticisms of McCain’s foreign policy experience:

Clark says that being a POW, no matter how honorable, doesn’t make his foreign policy any less stupid. For McCain’s part, he said he had been Swiftboated, which, if you’re a Democrat, suggests Clark was lying about McCain’s service, or if you’re a Republican, that Clark was exposing McCain for the fraud he was. Or is that now vice-versa? The point is, as two men who served, they are you, and therefore can’t criticize each other without criticizing you, and to disagree with either one of them is to disagree with yourself. And I’m not talking the fake soldiers like Kerry – or McCain, depending on which one you feel was or wasn’t Swiftboated — but the real, honest to God heroes like Kerry. Or McCain. Depending. Because lord knows it can’t be both. Right? 

The fact is, no one speaks for what you want  but (drum roll….) — YOU.  As the polls show, you, like the rest of the country, come from all walks of life and political persuasions (ultra-liberal blogger Kos served during the first Gulf War), and like the rest of the country, you prefer one candidate or the other. Some of you believe in ethanol. Some don’t. Some think we should stay. Some don’t. And everyone who hasn’t been there wants to find you, provided you agree with them, so they can trot you out to bolster them. Better we all just deal with the fact that you don’t always agree with you, and for every one of you, there’s another you, except ten-times-braver and more bad-ass than you, who thinks you’re full of shit. Yet they’re out there serving their country for you anyway. Aren’t you lucky?

The hissy fit McCain’s been throwing over the DNC and MoveOn ads”, one would think those clips make him a tad bit nervous.  The ads show clips of a townhall meeting where McCain shrugged off a questioner’s assertion that Bush would keep forces in Iraq for 50 years, and said, ”maybe 100″.

Here is the transcript:

Offscreen voice: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
On screen graphic: Senator McCain. President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain: Maybe a hundred. That’d be fine with me.
On screen: 100 years in Iraq.
On screen: 5 years. $500 billion. Over 4,000 dead.
Offscreen voice: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain: Maybe 100.
Narrator: If all he offers is more of the same, is John McCain the right choice for America’s future?
On screen: Is John McCain the right choice for America’s future?
Narrator: The Democratic National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.
 

McCain tried to explain away his remarks this way:

John McCain defended his now infamous “100 years in Iraq” comments made at a town hall back in January, contending the Democrats are deliberately distorting his remarks. He explained today that those who say he wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years are making a “direct falsification” and apologized that campaigns “have to deteriorate in this fashion.”

On a purely rational level, this argument is strange. It is impossible for McCain to say the ad “deliberately distorted” his words, unless he’s claiming the videotape was altered (which Republicans, at least, are not shy about doing).  Especially, when McCain is deliberately distorting what the ad says – there is no mention of “war” anywhere, only McCain’s answer.

What McCain is essentially saying is, “It’s outrageous to suggest I’d be willing to fight a war in Iraq for 100 years, when I clearly said we’d stay 100 years after we won the war.”  How long will that take? As long as it takes. Even if it takes 100 years.

Yet, the whining from GOP circles has been so ear-piercing that they even Factcheck wagged their fingers at an ad because they hadn’t done enough to spin what McCain actually meant by this. To make matters worse, the McCain camp duped the media into portraying his words as a “gaffe” when he not only repeated the claim, but extended it to 1,000, 10,000, even a million years when confronted about his comments days later.

If there is any argument at all, it is that McCain’s quote, clipped short, leaves an impression that McCain wants war. If the Democrats have a point, it is that McCain clearly implies he’s willing to stay under present circumstances, unless he’s completely bonkers and thinks we’re only a short time away from zero US casualties. By Factcheck’s own standards, their post is as irresponsible a distortion as the DNC because their “correction” implies  McCain would not stay in Iraq if the violence continues, when he has gone out of his way to suggest the opposite. I don’t think there’s a journalist, regardless of whether or not they are claiming McCain’s words were taken out of context, who is under any dellussions McCain would leave Iraq — which is precisely the message implied by both those ads that McCain wants to shoot down. He wants to shoot them down, not because they distort his position, but because it states all too clearly what his position actually is — which is why the “don’t cut-and-run” crowd are those objecting the loudest.

John H. McFadden had an interesting post on the tactics of guilty-by-association yesterday, in relation to the Rev. Wright controversy. Basically, he says even arguing why Obama didn’t leave the church has an implied message: “Because he stayed in that church, he must be a closet black radical.”

 I see a similar strategy at work here. Politics argues in poetry. What is said is often just a metaphore for the real argument — the one we aren’t allowed to have.

So when can we start the countdown on McCain’s 100 year war? He won’t say, and no one will ask. The implication being that it’s taboo to mention the elephant in the living room.

McCain doesn’t want to leave. So you better not say it.