A Helpful Matt Bai Skipper

Times contributer Matt Bai will have a long NY Times magazine entry this Sunday.  Apparently it is an upscale attempt to Swiftboat John McCain (You know I use that term mockingly) by de-legitimizing his wartime experience.  My advice to Attack Dems intent on this path - have fun storming the castle!

Fortunately, we can all skip directly to the vivisection - Karl at Team Protein, Michael Goldfarb, and Capt. Ed cover the bases.

Briefly, Bai ignores the good news out of Basra (deadline problems?) and McCain's extensive study of insurgencies in the Naval War College after Vietnam.

Comments

[Danube of Thought]

Here's Bai:

"McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol."

Is it possible to point out to Mr. Bai that Kerry's "disillusionment" caused him to toss away exactly zero of his war decorations--not a single one--and that he now displays them proudly in his Senate office? Or that Kerry was never in any "jungle?"

I am not aware that James Webb ever underwent any "conversion" or expressed any disillusionment of any kind, and as for Hagel I couldn't care less what the man has to say.

It's also clear from Kerry's worshipful biography, Tour of Duty, that he was against the war before he ever saw it, and did not expect to see it when he volunteered for the Swift Boats. Can Mr. Bai entertain the possibility that Mr. Kerry knew exactly what his position on the war would have to be if he were to seek office successfully in Massachusetts, and that he was simply an opportunist?

God, these agenda-driven bastards make me sick.

[Gmax]

Kerry was in the Navy just like McCain. Why is that so different to Bai? Getting shot at on a patrol boat on a river is much worse that anti aircraft fire at your airplane? especially when your plane is shot down and you are injured in the ejection from the crash?

Is it the experience or the mettle of the person that should be the focus? I would posit that real physical and mental torture and involuntary captivity is certainly jarring and it would not be impossible to be morally broken and severely disillusioned, among other things. But that did not happen. I wonder why, even if Bai is not the least bit curious.

[PeterUK]

""McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle;"

Easy,two feet shorter,not as well dressed,sallow complexion,shooting at you.Though in John Kerry's case,it could have been anybody doing the shooting.

[clarice]

PUK you wiseass.I heart you.

[Crunchy Frog]

"Briefly, Bai ignores the good news out of Basra..."

And in other news, the sun rose in the east this morning.

[PeterUK]

"Though in John Kerry's case,it could have been anybody doing the shooting."

Then again,in John Kerry's case,he could have been shooting anybody.

Amazing how Kerry only came to love the Vietnamese after he killed one.

[SukieTawdry]

I doubt four months aboard a Swift Boat is sufficient time to become seriously disillusioned or morally jarred regardless of how confusing the jungle. Kerry's disillusionment and subsequent "conversion" came when he ran for office in Massachusetts as a Vietnam vet war hero and lost necessitating a whole new schtick.

[clarice]

Sukie, what a great penname!

[atics]

Jim Webb.

[Danube of Thought]

What about Jim Webb?

[PeterUK]

The man was born "morally jarred",the midwife slapped the wrong end.

[clarice]

PUK, as far as I can tell even his parents didn't particularly care for him.

[PeterUK]

So they were shooting at him as well?

[PeterUK]

Really thoughtful of them to take a trip to Cambodia at Christmas.

[Pagar]

"Kerry's disillusionment and subsequent "conversion" came " From his Father

"Introduction

"Previous articles have drawn attention to the liberal foreign policy orientation of John Kerry’s father Richard Kerry. This article digs deeper into Richard Kerry’s background, exploring how his foreign policy views were influenced by Communist fellow travellers from Harvard Law School and the State Department, and how this influence was in turn passed on from Richard Kerry to his children. "

[clarice]

Yes--from his dad, a cold fish if there ever was one, he learned to marry rich, socially prominent women while espousing leftist views. Also he learned Europe=good; USA=bad.

[Jane]

Gee,

Sounds a bit like Obama.

[PeterUK]

John Kerry is Obama white.

[John Kerry]

Yes he is, PUK.

[vnjagvet]

Couldn't resist, Peter.

[Pagar]

Hello John Kerry,
Want to tell us why it was so important to you to have your friends running around Vietnam killing my friends and fellow service members?

[PeterUK]

John Kerry,
Whilst you are here,were you aiming at the the Vietnamese or his water buffalo?

[JM Hanes]

John Kerry was making anti-war noises on stage before he went to VietNam.

Goldfarb also quotes this curious Bai aside:

(To the dismay of many of his critics, McCain often uses “Al Qaeda” as a shorthand for the Iraqi insurgent group that calls itself Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.)

Ignoring the disingeuous "dismay of many of his critics," am I wrong in thinking that AQI has never, in fact, called themselves al Qaeda in "Mesopotamia" at all? I thought that was a purely domestic NYTimes-style fabrication designed to avoid the manifest sin of putting "Qaeda" and "Iraq" in the same sentence.

[Pagar]

Here's the Numbers your friends killed, John. I don't have all the names with me, but they've been etched in stone on a Wall, so that America will never forget. I hope you never do, John. The troops, whose names are on that Wall, they were doing their duty for their country, John. I've always wondered John, who were you doing what you did for the enemy, for?

[PeterUK]

"a purely domestic NYTimes-style fabrication designed to avoid the manifest sin of putting "Qaeda" and "Iraq" in the same sentence."

Since Mesopotamia is Greek meaning "land between two rivers",the is not a cat in hell's chance an Arab terrorist using it.

[Sara]

Getting shot at on a patrol boat on a river is much worse that anti aircraft fire at your airplane? especially when your plane is shot down and you are injured in the ejection from the crash?

Let's see, a rice grain in the butt is more jarring than being shot out of the sky and tortured for years. Okay, got that.

disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle;

Yeah, and hearing how your own countrymen/women were cheering on the enemy while sitting on an enemy anti-aircraft gun wasn't disillusioning and morally jarring while you were held captive in a hell hole being tortured brutally every day by those same enemies? Give me a break.

[Cecil Turner]

My personal favorite was relying on Max Cleland as a self-appointed ground combat expert (when, AFAICT, he never engaged in any):

Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam.

And I particularly like the way his vote on the war is morphing into a profile in courage:

In 2005, he said "it was obvious that if I voted against the resolution that I would be dead meat in the race, just handing them in a victory." He characterized his vote for war as "the worst vote I cast."

Not sure what "lesson" I'm supposed to learn from all this, but I think it has something to do with being careful with offensive weaponry (lest one blow oneself up . . . something of a repetitive theme amongst the quoted Dems, apparently).

[Donna V.]

I know Webb is against the war in Iraq. I'm wondering about Bai's assertion that Webb was "disillusioned" by his experiences in Vietnam. If Webb is disllusioned and "morally jarred" by Vietnam, it happened quite recently:

In a November 19, 2006 appearance on Meet the Press, Webb told host Tim Russert, "And I, you know, I’m one of these people who — there, there aren’t many of us — who can still justify for you the reasons that we went into Vietnam, however screwed up the strategy got."

Of course, putting a "D" after your name has certainly been known to lead to moral jarring.

[Danube of Thought]

Donna, I'm with you. If Jim Webb was ever in Matt Bai's "disillusioned" group, I sure as hell never heard of it. And I was paying attention for a long time: he was a USNA grad, had written on the war, and was appointed SecNav by Reagan. Disillusioned? News to me. But Bai doesn't care if it's true or not.

(For the matter of that, I'm not aware of any evidence that Hegel ever voiced any "disillusionment" back when doing so would have counted--but again, I don't care about anything this weasel has to say.)

[Crew v1.0]

Chuck Hagel voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Fun fact. It was nice of Matt Bai to make mention of this. Usually, articles about the courageous patriot Chuck Hagel omit this inconvenient fact, and skip to his heroic rage against the Cheney machine.

Good luck in your next career, Senator Hagel.

[JM Hanes]

Over at Protein Wisdom, Karl doubles down with an Addendum:
"The hackery in Matt Bai’s piece exists on several levels." When you have to expand on a post that tackled "ignorance, laziness, arrogance and a progressive bias against US military actions" because it didn't cover all the bases, I'd say were dealing with hackery on almost every conceivable level.

[Larry]

A very high number of prisoners held in the North were aviators. Watching the POW returns on TV, I recognized plenty of those faces. We lost 6 KIA out of about 100 in my squadron the 13 months I was in country. Anyone who thinks "the jungle" causes confusion in war hasn't supported troops in contact at night in poor weather. SEA was more aviation casualty prone than most wars. Some reasons are obvious, others not so and all subjects of a separate discussion.

[Cecil Turner]

Anyone who thinks "the jungle" causes confusion in war hasn't supported troops in contact at night in poor weather.

Thanks for that. I had an eyeroll at the same point, but figured it wasn't worth trying to explain. (Though for graduate-level disorientation, nothing beats night vision goggles. I still chuckle remembering a buddy's story of getting so mentally fouled up he boresighted the moon for about 30 seconds . . . because it was the only thing he was sure had to be "up.")

[bio mom]

Just who do they think they are going to convince with this stuff? The Democrats have a suicide instinct whenever confronted with a defense-related situation. They want to discount McCain as a war hero which will never work and end up turning people off. And they fall into a trap and go berserk because Bush made a speech about appeasers. So now we know that they indeed are likely to be appeasers or they wouldn't be so defensive about it. Very foolish on both fronts.