Straight talk on McCain

Rolling Stone's article on McCain:

1. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

2. I also like what Michael Moore's "Mike's Election Guide 2008" says.

pgs. 43-48, says, on McCain's Vietnam experience,
"He was sent to Vietnam, along with hundreds of thousands of others, in an attempt to prop up what was essentially an American colony, South Vietnam, which was being run by a dictator whom the U.S. had installed.

Lest we forget, the Vietnam War represented a mass slaughter by the United States government on a scale that sought to rival our genocide of the Native Americans. The U.S. Armed Forces killed more than two million civilians in Vietnam (and perhaps another million more in Laos and Cambodia). The Vietnamese had done nothing to us. They had not bombed or invaded or even sought to murder a single American. President Johnson and the Pentagon lied to Congress in order to get a vote passed to put the war into full gear. Only two senators had the guts to say "no." Almost 3 million troops ended up serving in Vietnam. The U.S. dropped more tons of bombs on the Vietnamese people thatn the Allied poweres dropped during all of World War II.

In response, during the nine years of the war, not a single Vietnamese bomb was dropped on U.S. soil, not a single Vietnamese terrorist attack took place in the USA. But we poured 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals on their villages and rice fields. The number of injured, wounded, and severely deformed Vietnamese has never been counted because it is just too huge for anyone to calculate, let alone comprehend.

And yet, with all the death and destruction we visited upon the Vietnamese, we lost the war. They never gave up. Just as I'd like to think we would never give up should we ever be on the receiving end of such a horrific assault from an invading force.

During Christmas of 1972, although the U.S. was months away from callling it quits, President Nixon ordered the carpet bombing of the civilian population of Hanoi and Haiphong. Two-thousand combat sorties dropped 20,000 tons of bombs in a final burst of anger for having been beaten by a nation of peasants who didn't possess even a single attack helicopter or bomber plane during the entire war.

John McCain flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam in a campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. During this bombing campaign, which lasted for almost 44 months, U.S. forces flew 307,000 attack sorties, dropping 643,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam (roughly the same amount of tonnage dropped in the Pacific during all of World War II). Though the state targets were factories, bridges, and power plants, thousands of bombs also fell on homes, schools, and hospitals. In the midst of the campaign, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara estimated that we were killing 1,000 civilians a week. That's more than one 9/11 every single month- for 44 months.

In his book, Faith of Our Fathers, McCain wrote that he was upset that he had been limited to bombing military installations, roads, and power plants. He said such restrictions were "illogical" and "senseless."

"I do believe," McCain wrote, "that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistestent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." In other words, McCain believes we could have won the Vietnam war had he been able to drop even more bombs.

I would like to see one brave reproter during the election season ask this simple question of John McCain: "Is it morally right to drop bombs and missiles in a 'heavily populated' area where hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians will perish?"