Salon reader Zack Galler, a former naval officer, writes:
McCain's claim to national attention is as our most prominent victim of bad luck. During his brief naval career, he had two aircraft destroyed beneath him, one by a Zuni rocket, another by a NVA missile. Granted he survived through unusual stoicism and discipline, but, bereft of these, his problem-solving cupboard is bare. Witness his pitiful response to the Kosovo fiasco, a call to persist and endure in whatever military horrors the commander in chief invents. His first principles are invariably to throw the weight of government regulation and law (as manifestations of discipline) against individual choice (tobacco, political speech [i.e. campaign finance reform], drug reform).
It's not expansiveness and charisma that the man lacks; it's the total absence of subtlety, creativity, and original thought which, hopefully, should sentence him to retirement as a minor politician from a minor state. He's a Sherwood Anderson grotesque.
If the media think they're atoning for their Vietnam-era sins or doing veterans a favor by giving this Strangelovian refugee a free ride, I wish they'd reconsider.
From Camille Paglia's column |
