"Hero?

I completely agree with Grubert who questions the hero value of McCain. Is it an act of braveness to fall prisoner of the adversary? Is it a sign of braveness to make deals with the adversaries? NOOOOOOOOO. That guy is an opportunist."

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Dangerous turf to get into McCain's "war hero" status, but I guess there's part of me that is willing to navigate land mines. I'm going to quote Rachel Maddow with a phrase she initiated into my mind: "his [McCain's] service as a POW."

IMO, I don't think Maddow was making or intending to make any maligning comment toward McCain whatsoever. AT ALL. In all likelihood, she turned a phrase in the moment of her banter that just happened to stick with me (and maybe others?). But her words got me thinking. That very phrase [HIS SERVICE AS A POW] totally struck me. I thought about it a lot. He graduated about what, three or five guys down on the very bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. He wrecked a few very expensive (tax-payer-paid) planes being a rebel maverick cocky sort of guy (self-admitted and proven). Then he was sending down bombs on civilians and got captured.

Part of me would like to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, and I have in the past (although this particular year, not much--yikes! morph morph morph to the nth degree, vote Bush policies unilaterally, get cozy with Evangelicals, bring ignorant [not stupid: ignorant] Palin on board--this is your VP backup, she can see Russia yet doesn't have a passport? Even to return to the U.S. from Canada you need a passport!). But war hero?

Besides thinking he should start running on actual policies and plans, and quit running on the basis of something he says he doesn't even like to talk about, yet he and his campaign brings up constantly, I am confronted now with: he SERVED this country as a POW! That's the street cred.

I am IN NO WAY saying that any tortuous treatment or conditions he suffered should be downplayed or forgotten. Nobody should go through that. Nobody.

I'd rather hear more about his 26 years in public office and where he wants to lead this country. Let that be the reason why to vote yay or nay. War hero. There are many people who deserve that title. I'm down to this...whatever your criteria for POTUS, that shouldn't be the only one, and you gotta, you just gotta, consider what wars we're already in and the ones that could be coming.

I truly hope that your post about your dad (and about more than him) will speak volumes to many readers here.

My dad was raised in a teeny-tiny town in Texas, but he got a football scholarship to attend Georgetown University in DC. About a year into his education there, WWII broke out and my dad relinquished his scholarship to enlist with the Marines. He served and later rarely, make that hardly ever, talked about his experiences at war. (We don't have any written memoir, but we have some war-time photos--still not sure how he even got them, some are press photos!--and a few tales he told when his life was near the end of some of the "buddy" times, hard to call them "funny" stories considering the context, but they were more toward the comaraderie and, well, kinda silly things troops might do to keep the morale up in rotten times. I thought it was rather positive for him to be able to open up to that part of his service.) His younger two brothers also served in the military (one in the Army and one in the Air Force) but not during war time, and basically managed to get a good education, college degrees, as a result.

What you said about how to define a "hero" struck home with me for sure. I agree completely that the term is "thrown around so loosely that it has, at times, lost most of its meaning."

I believe about my dad, as you stated about your dad, that "hero" applies. In my dad's case, that may be because he was MY hero. But in the broader sense, he enlisted when he didn't have to and gave up a college scholarship to do it. But my dad wasn't a POW--your dad was. That's a situation my dad didn't have to face. Still, I know with all my heart that my dad, too, would be devastated by the lack of respect being shown our modern-day soldiers--from insurance benefits to conditions at veteran's hospitals to treatment of families to post-traumatic stress syndrome to deployment after deployment...the list is long. Way too long. This should be obvious to any rational being, vet or not, though especially to the former.

Because several posters recommended it, I opened up the site. I have NOT yet gone through it. I am interested in what it potentially has to offer. But I have to say, I was completely turned off by the top banner advertisement showing two, count 'em two (at least they're bipartisan) horrific shots of those horrible bad terrible awful emasculating mean nasty you-know-whats...aka the women behind the men, except this time they're out front and the men are seemingly superfluous. Neither Michelle Obama nor Cindy McCain are running for office. Neither should be front & center in such an ad, nor any ad, for that matter. And the depictions border on the stuff of nightmares.

I am extremely cautious when it comes to claiming sexism, but WOW, was I offended.

The soda jerk's ad was a poll on "who's more likely to cheat?"

Sorry, I will look at the content of the site, but I was seriously offended by that banner ad.