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Originally Posted by dabateman
Mindless spin to avoid the facts... YET AGAIN. I'm not surprised. Selective vision. That's fine. Republican only. That's fine. Just don't pretend that it's an intellectual position to have. You've not actually compared the achievements of Barack to these people. You sanctimoniously place military service above civil service, ownership above hardwork, and the words of one Sarah Palin above the words of those who know Barack. Fine.
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When you are a military leader you are required to make decisions. Lots of them. You can't vote, "present." Sometimes you are called upon to make decisions where there is much at stake. You understand that military leaders know their decisions will sometimes mean the difference between life and death or even more important than that; the outcome of battles and sometimes the survival of their nation.
Wartime military leadership can be easier to recognize and assess than peacetime military leadership. So, we should not use war as the
only criterion for judging character and judgment. The military has experience with assessing character, judgment and leadership ability. Those with the right stuff are given command positions. And in the case of John McCain, he was given command of the largest naval aviation squadron in the Navy. And maybe one of its more problematic. Perhaps the Navy recognized in John McCain his reformer's instinct even then.
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Mr. McCain won a coveted assignment as commanding officer of the Navy's largest squadron, the Replacement Air Group in Jacksonville, Fla. This was Mr. McCain's first chance to command men (and a few women), but the squadron had a mediocre record and parts shortages meant that only half the planes were flyable at any time.
''Inertia had set in,'' recalled Carl Smith, then an instructor pilot in the squadron. ''We had some crusty old guys running maintenance, and they were masters at saying, 'no, no, no.' But then McCain came in and changed them overnight and brought in new people.''
All this raised eyebrows and hackles, and some senior officers grumbled about favoritism for the admiral's son. When Mr. McCain failed in his initial efforts to qualify to land an A-7 aircraft on a carrier, a failure that would have blocked his career, some senior officers were delighted.
John M. Johnson, then a junior officer helping people qualify for the A-7, remembers two senior officers taking him and a co-worker aside and ordering them to make sure that Mr. McCain did not make it. But the junior officers were mesmerized by ''the Skipper,'' as Mr. McCain was called, because of both his record in Vietnam and his glow of leadership.
So Mr. Johnson and the other young officers coached the Skipper tirelessly for his second try on the A-7, training him on the simulator and prepping him every moment they could. And when he qualified, they held a huge party, celebrating him for a version of the inspiration and iconoclasm that he now lays claim to in presidential politics.
''I personally joined the Navy to avoid being drafted in the Army,'' Mr. Johnson recalled, but he added that he stayed partly because he had been so inspired by the Skipper. Mr. Johnson has done fine for himself since then: he made his comments in an e-mail interview from the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier, where he is the admiral in charge of the carrier battle group.
This loyalty to the Skipper was widespread. As one tracks down and talks to the men he once commanded, it is striking how often their voices light up as they describe something magical about the Skipper.
Officers recall that he would hurtle into the maintenance shops and start kidding the officers, peppering them with rapid-fire questions and jokes, urging them, scolding them and leaving them fired up. Mr. McCain learned the names of all the enlisted men so that he could tease them as vociferously as the officers, a mild breach of protocol that won their hearts.
They responded, and by the time he left the squadron in 1977, every single aircraft had left the disabled list -- the last one, which had been out for two years, was restored on his next-to-last day.
Although plagued by fatal accidents in the past, the squadron had no fatalities under his command (a turkey buzzard that shattered the windshield of a student pilot's plane almost changed that, but officers talked the pilot down safely), and won its first meritorious unit citation. Mr. McCain's success attracted notice among the admirals in Washington.
P.O.W. to Power Broker, A Chapter Most Telling - New York Times
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Throughout the history of mankind military leaders have become the peacetime leaders of their nations as well.
The point here is that Obama may be the greatest guy to know as a friend or acquaintance. He may be thoughtful and a good family man and a great orator and organizer. But he has shied away from making his mark wherever he has gone.
In college many say they don't recall him well. In Law School he distinguished himself by becoming editor of the Law Review but he never wrote a single article for that journal. As an organizer he, admirably, took a back seat to the people he empowered. As a state Senator he voted "present" 120 times. And as a U.S. Senator, despite having written two memoirs about himself, he hadn't written any legislation. And after 143 days as a Senator he decided to run for the highest office in the land.
And now people are saying he has better qualifications than Sarah Palin, who has had to make decisions, and be right about these decisions, starting her first day as a Mayor.
And if she hadn't exercised good judgment and gotten those decisions right she would not have been able to become Governor.
Barack has zero accomplishments.
All hat. No cattle.
And even if one were to judge him ONLY on the basis of his hat, he wouldn't look very attractive.
Trillions of dollars in tax increases.
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Obama's Trillion-Dollar Spending Plan
February 14, 2008 01:37 PM ET | James Pethokoukis | Permanent Link
What does "change" cost? About a quarter of a trillion bucks a year, according to Barack Obama. But first, this: "I wish Obama would go further than that, but it's a start," was the reaction of one DailyKos poster to Barack Obama's economic plan unveiled yesterday in a campaign appearance in Janesville, Wis. Some hard-core liberals may be underwhelmed by the scope of Obama's agenda—after all, there's no single-payer healthcare plan or Scandinavian-style "flexicurity" worker benefits program in the mix—but my guess is that the average person would find it all pretty aggressive. Here are the priciest parts:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-...ding-plan.html
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