Heartiste on Jeb Bush’s Beta-ness, and Schanberg on McCain’s Treason

And they complained when Donald mentioned Jeb’s wife.

More and more, I think there is a large part of the electorate that just hates politicians – all of them. I think I’d like Rick Perry as a friend, but when I see him demand an apology from Donald for all veterans, my stomach turns.

Donald has wisely positioned himself as the anti-politician, and it is a role he fills well. No politician would say a tenth the things he says. And every time real politicians try to fight him, it makes it ever easier to take Donald’s side.

Along those lines, I remember the story of an ex-Special Forces officer and POW activist who grabbed one of John McCain’s aides, pulled him a stairwell, and gave him a beating right in the Capitol Building. I read about it in a media article which portrayed the guy as a nutcase, and back then in those pre-internet days, if the media said it, it must be true. But then I read this, by Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times Reporter Sydney Schanburg.

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books…

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain…

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement…

It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain…

The rest of the piece is just heart-breaking, in its recount of the evidence that we left men behind, and the extent to which the political class and media appear to have gone to great lengths to cover it up. Then there are the shadowy images of powerful people behind the scenes who benefit from the service of brave and loyal men, and yet feel no compunction about using their puppets in power to cut those brave men loose when their usefulness is at an end.

You wonder how people, so disgusted by a corrupt system, could support an apparent outsider like Trump? Maybe Trump is just one of them, another actor in the play. However of all of them, at present he would seem the most likely bull in a china shop that would, under the same circumstances, bring POWs home at all costs when all the rest of the machine was screaming to leave them behind.

Fuck the machine.