McCain Ad: A Fraud in the Arena

The McCain campaign has a new ad, and his supporters are encouraging people to watch it.

The ad is a pretty big fraud, start to finish.

I'd like you to imagine the power of the Third Reich. Millions of soldiers with guns, thousands of tanks, figher planes, bombers, V2 rockets, a huge propaganda catapult, and control over almost all of Europe. Reports from the 1940 Republican National Convention suggest that Herbert Hoover was considering throwing his hat in the ring as the candidate who was going to acknowledge that Hitler had already won and who could do business with him(Peters 2005, 78-79).

The real experts, when quoted, will say there were a few hundred "hard core" members of al-Qaeda in 2001, and that maybe 20,000 people had gone through the training camps set up in Afghanistan in association with the group.

The ad pulls no punches comparing Winston Churchill and John McCain, and the Second World War with the so-called War on Terror.

The ad shows a lot of footage of John McCain during the Viet Nam war, where he served. It's almost ironic that he quotes Churchill saying "Never yield to force, never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." But John McCain did yield. The fact that he got shot down maybe says he was a bad pilot, but the fact that he was captured alive says he did yield.

A better person than I would make fine points about the Banana Republic wars that Teddy Roosevelt was engaged in. Perhaps alluding to the esteemed Smedley Butler.

Peters, Charles. Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2005