John McCain is real fond of using the military. The military is already streached thin, so thin that additional deployments aren't possible. John wants to use them some more, and more. There really isn't any way but one. A draft. And Wednesday in Las Cruces, New Mexico at a townhall meeting John let it slip.
"Disabled veterans, especially in this state, have horrible conditions," the woman said. "Their medical is substandard. They drive four hours one way to Albuquerque for a simple doctor's appointment, which is often cancelled. Our VA hospital is dirty, it's understaffed, it's running on maximum overload. The prescription medicines are ten years behind standard medical care. We have 700 claims stacked up at the VA office in Albuquerque. Some of them are ten--seven years old, waiting to be processed. In the meantime, people are homeless. My son is an officer in the Air Force, I'm a vet, and I was raised in a military family. And I think it's a sorry state of affairs when we have illegal aliens, having a Medicaid card, that can access specialist top physicians--the best of medical--and our vets can't even get to a doctor.
"And these are the people we tied yellow ribbons for, and Bush patted on the back. If we don't reenact the draft, I don't think we'll have anyone to chase bin Laden to the gates of Hell."
"Ma'am," the Senator responded, "let me say that I don't disagree with anything you said. Thank you, and I am grateful for your support of all of our veterans."
For Pete's sake, how else could he do it? Oh, surely after the reactions start, he'll claim to not have heard the "draft" part of the statement. Maybe he'll just deny he said any such thing.
The point in having a military is not to use it. Yes, I mean that, its point is its non-use. It is the iron fist inside the velvet glove. That presence is known and understood while the soft glove gets its work-out. Warfare works on two levels, killing or maiming the opposition and making resistance fearfully inappropriate. Intimidation is not persuasion, it is not even close.
John McCain's idea is to shoot and pick up the pieces later, the immediate problem with that is the loss of life and general mayhem and the future problem is the level of enmity engendered by that mayhem. Unless you obliterate entire nations and groups they live on and their families and friends live on, with a bullseye on the offender's forehead. Does anyone have positive ideas for the viewpoints of today's children of Iraq? Has their childhood given them some reason to like and respect the US? Whatever risks adult life posed in Saddam's Iraq these children's post-Saddam life has not been a positive experience. What booby traps have we set in motion for our own today's children? Exactly how much more of this is John McCain proposing?
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