Wes Clark got it exactly right when he said McCain's military experience is irrelevant to service in the White House. Flying a fighter aircraft off of a Carrier provides absolutely nothing of use to anyone charged with running a complex organization or with understanding and implementing policy. The same is true for the period he spent, unfortuante as it is, as a POW. If McCain is going to promote his Navy service as a reason to vote for him it is perfectly legimate to question what about those experiences adds to his qualifications to be president. To be truthful there is absolutely nothing he can say to further this discussion.
Furthermore to many of us there is another dimension to this issue. As an Army Combat officer (same rank as McCain) who spent all of 1969 serving in Vietnam, I have always privately compared my service to those officeres who flew off an Aircraft Carrier in clean, dry clothes, dropped thier lethal ordinace from 25,000 feet on people they could not see or hear and a short time later enjoyed a steak and some comraderie in the ward room. Some of us were forced to look at the carnage we wrought, the faces of the dead, to look into the eyes of an armless woman, to hear the screans of people with whom you had no quarrel. Is there a difference between those men who cooly dispensed death from the clouds and those who are forced to face the consequences of thier acts, to see the dead kids, the ripped bodies, the destruction of community? If John McCain's naval service is truly a qualification for the Presidency, then Wesley Clark should get all of our votes. Clark didn't graduate near the very bottom of his acadamy class and he didn't have two Admirals in his familiy to grease his entry into flight school. Horaay for Clark's courage and straight talk. It is nice to hear some straight talk once in a while!!!

My own question about McCain is how many times he gets to go to that well: being a heroic POW got him elected to congress and then the Senate. So what about after that?

Asking us to elect him because of a smoothly fictionalized (by which I mean, worked over by campaign ad men, again and again) prison experience creates some interesting problems for McCain and the campaign: does he (does it) deal with our own, frequently tortured, prisoners of war (no matter what bullshit word games the Bushies may have tried, the judgement of the SCOTUS is that they are, in fact, our prisoners and it is a war)?

McCain informs us that his collusion with the North Vietnamese was elicited by torture. Well, we're putting a guy on trial (for his life) right now, whose testimony, elicited via torture (more word games), is the primary evidence our prosecutors have.

So, if McCain's Hanoi Hilton experiences prove his character to be Presidential, what about all the guys we tortured in Guantanamo and Abu Graibh? Whose President do they get to be?

I'm not trying to be funny here. I don't think this situation is funny at all. I think McCain should can the war hero crap and tell us why he should be President based on something (anything) he's done in the last twenty years. If he has so much CHARACTER I'm sure he's found other ways to exercise and display it during his career in public office. if not, then not. This isn't funny at all. Wes Clark is not the one who should be apologizing. And Obama should stop pussyfooting around every polling point: he should back Clark, because Clark is right.

My question regarding McCain is, does he really have all that much character, in terms that are relevant to the job he wants? I haven't seen it. And my question regarding Obama is, when will he display a spine?

tom:

Most of us that served our 3 - 4 years as enlisted and got the hell out as Sergeant E-5s or? would smile to watch you guys square off on each other. What was it? One of Patton's soldiers who said:

"His guts and our blood."

Who are you, Clark, and McCain kidding? So you walked around the field and confirmed body count. Most of us had no choice, so we did the dirty work.

God bless you all. Obama has to be smiling too as you guys go to town on each other. Bigger things to argue about, like the economy, like energy, like jobs, like education, etc.

Leave the war stories right where they need to be . . . in the past when we were all gods and invulnerable

Amen tho I felt neither god-like nor invulnerable. I was scared shitless most of the time, at least for a while, and then was mostly numb. I blessed the fast movers when they got our asses out of a jam and damned them when I knew they'd be going back to white sheets and porcelein while I "lived" in the mud and the bugs and the stink. We did have some good officers tho, guys who lived down and dirty with us, who didn't just walk "around the field and confirmed body count". If I had my druthers about the military experience I'd want to see in a president, it would be to have one of those officers or one of our NCOs, men who lived it with us at our level, in the Oval Office. Whether or not by itself that's sufficient qualification to be president is another thing entirely. Yet, if someone is to give the order for my children or my grandchildren to go into harm's way, I'd rather it be from a person who has personally looked into the eyes of scared teenagers and ordered them to do this or that or go here or there knowing full well that the chances of them going home in a body bag were high.