Doesn’t Anybody Know How To Play This Game?

by digby

The McCain campaign did not seem especially eager to put the matter to rest. On Tuesday, two of Mr. McCain’s closest allies — Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and retired United States Marine Corps Lt. Col. Orson Swindle — not only rejected General Clark’s recent remark, but also began to question his own military service. On a conference call with reporters, Mr. Swindle pointed out that Senator McCain has been endorsed by scores of former military generals, admirals and prisoners of war. “General Clark probably wouldn’t get that much praise from this group,” Mr. Swindle said. “As high ranking as he is, his record in his last command was less than stellar.”

That should be the Democrats’ cue to begin wailing and rending their garments and immediately gathering a bunch of Albanian immigrants to go on television to demand that John McCain stop insulting the heroic American general who stopped the genocide of their people. And there are plenty of them who would be honored to do it. He has streets named after him in Kosovo.

But that would be unseemly, I’m sure, so we will simply evade and avoid and let the whole thing go. Too bad about Clark.

I’m not entirely joking here. This coordinated swoon has pushed Clark out of the campaign (and possibly the administration) and put Webb on notice. The point is always to render impotent any credible military voices from the left and turn military voices from the right into untouchable, sacred icons. These things keep working as long as Democrats are ineffectual in pushing them back. This one may blow over for the moment. But it got the job done. We won’t be hearing anything more about whether or not John McCains POW status gives him superior moral and expert authority on foreign policy and military affairs. It now goes without saying that it does. And we probably won’t be hearing from Clark any more either, at least not in the campaign. They have achieved their objectives.

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