Meghan is doing a fantastic job of making her dad look cool and fun.
I almost expect a McCain Girls Gone Wild video soon.
Shouldn’t everyone play along?

Hmmm…are those girls wearing their seatbelts?

If the Dems won Danny Boy’s district, how the fuck can McCain win?
Or am I being naive?
He is a low talking pol… who will be an ineffectual bore in the campaign…
Hell, we could exhume Adlai and win…
I thunk…

Do journalists pay for these meals at politician barbeques or what?

I know politicians accepting meals from lobbyists has been banned but is it still OK for politicians to buy journalists meals? Aren’t they lobbying the press for good coverage?

It would be a fun ‘gotcha’ piece for some muckraking outfit to see what journalists have accepted from pols that would constitute a violation if a pol accepted it from a lobbyist.

quick, before they scrub the site: meaghan’s blog has lots of photos from the bbq. the one captioned “Press & Adam” shows quite the happy crew. “Sen. Graham with Mrs. Gramm and Sen. Gramm with Charlie Black” also fun.

it’s under “monday, march 3 – sunday in sedona”

http://mccainblogette.com/

Pretty cheap way for the GOP’s heir apparent to nobble the press: a few pounds of ribs, sauce and charcoal, and a few kegs. Must make lobbyists frustrated at having to pay so much more to Congresscritters. The GOP didn’t have to spike the red meat for the public’s watch dogs. That’s what you get when dobermans turn into poodles.

One of the things that seems strange about McCain is that he never seems to have his whole family around.
I know he has older children that he adopted from his first marriage.
Two of his sons are in the military.
But I would expect to see his 16-yr old adopted daughter Bridget at the family and friends gathering.
Wouldn’t ya think?

Just in case I miss-hit on bmaz’ comment early in this thread – Could you be thinking of the recent piece on McCrusty’s intemperance, Mark Benjamin, who writes lengthy specialty pieces for Salon, very often on the military.

If so this is the link:

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…..print.html

I actually don’t know why this piece hasn’t attracted more attention, because it captures one of the two major rationales that drove me to resolve my own dilemma between Hillary & Barack shortly after Super Tuesday.

I may have come around earlier, but our friend eriposte at The Left Coaster, who many hear will remember from before Ms E Wheel did the exodus thing from TNH to here for doing such splendid [& splendidly overfocused] work on Cheney’s multi-spiggoted Niger/Iraq yellowcake uranium deal/talk/fiction/utter crapola, had assembled this characteristically massive opus on how we should all be rationalizing our choice among the two currently still on the island plus Edwards, the latter being to whom I was leaning heavily, which threw me for the better part of two weeks as I worked assiduously through his [again characteristic] labryinthe of links & inner links & side linkettes. Then Edwards left, and for whatever reason I was reading some attempted sideswipe in a reader comment on another blog, on the theme of Obama disingenuity, which the commenter felt was somehow ’proven’ by an interview a few years ago by The New Yorker’s David Remnick, which I, being still in search of the magic bunny answer, then read — which immediately sparked me to get up off my mouse thumb & read ”The Speech” Obama delivered in 2002 that Hillary now is sound-biting as the sum total of Obama’s insight into foreign affairs in general & Iraq in particular. The magic bunny turned on the light at that point & now I’m 100% Obama bound.

Anyway the Benjamin piece doesn’t just briefly re-visit one of McCrusty’s recent classic tantrums [I recall seeing a good one where he essentially threw a shopping centre fit sitting next to Carl Levin on the SAS Committee & though I have my reservations about Carl, notwithstanding his attempted act of sanity in 2002 with the Levin amendment, he earned some points in my book for his patient endurance of McCranky’s spitting up an interminable stream of irrational oppositional defiance all over the public record.] –

it also suggests that an awful lot of the Pentagon general staff who escaped infection by the nasty virus carried by Wolfowitz & Feith & Perle et al [nurtured in Dr Rumsfeldenstein’s laboratory of monstrosities] actually feel & are willing to admit that Obama is precisely the kind of Cool In the Face of Stress character they associate with both high level military leadership & Commander in Chiefship.

I liked the comments of all the ex-general staff officers except the one clearly representing the RNC line in supporting McCrusty, but in particular the comments of Paul Eaton seized my interest on the difference between the sort of on-the-line in-combat passion which some are crediting McCrusty with having [I’m with bmaz actually- it’s more like adult ADHD undiagnosed & untreated} & the large vista strategic thinking which characterize the best & brightest of our military’s officer corps.

Eaton made that in the US military first reactions are far too often just not the best reactions [as in life], & implied that there certainly something to be said for being able make military decisions on instinct.

I come from a family steeped at least as long in the military as McCrusty’s. IMO quick reaction time & quick thinking & impulses & instincts for those are among the primary drivers behind the US military approach to combat training. I have military forebears who were successful boxers & wrestlers & track athletes & they all did great in combat. [I also have military forebears in intelligence & logistics, & they did & are doing far more & better.]

The limitations of quick twitch forces are also among the bases for why we’ve trended over the decades since Viet Nam away from massed force attack strategies towards a greater commitment to tactical response times & specialized forces for particular missions & threats.

But [& I would think Eaton would agree with this] acting on instinct is inherently less reliable when the stimuli a fighting unit has to respond to is less immediate & more nuanced.

That is the reason why we tend to draw such a large percentage of our general staff officers from different streams & not just from tactical forces & others where the emphasis is on the ability to demonstrate survival instincts & even leadership in close intense combat responses.

All you have to do is look at the career lines of general staff officers to see that.

For example, among the Second World War officers we accept as having outstanding records were Patton of course, but much more Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall, ”Beetle” Smith – all of them big arena strategizers able to command & succeed in stuations which are quite far outside conventional & popular notions of the military context.

Recall that MacAthur for example was from the engineer corps & he got associated with the Phillipines because so much of the infrastructure there which brought that country into modernity & able to draw together as a cohesive political entity was planned & developed & built at his instigation & under his command.

And Marshall was credited & in my opinion properly with going to FDR & arguing that US military forces were best situated & best able to lead the post WWII restoration of the European infrastructure needed so desperately to allow western Europe to resist the coming Soviet threat of those days – & then assuming command of the effort to do just that – an effort that extended over well over a decade & proved so successful it’s come to be credited with forming the basis for the European Common Market & today’s European Union.

A lot of people might not know ”Beetle” Beddle Smith as a co-architect of the American spy service during WWII – or that he’s probably the most successful [maybe the only] DCI ever [He built up the CIA during its heyday to become a player in the Cold War.]

And I don’t think I need to say much on Eisenhower, except that he had a very limited combat experience in WWI which one would be hard pressed to suggest contributed in any major way to the role he was called on to play in WWII – which was essentially a diplomatic role – to oversee the coordination of the militaries of a large number of functioning democracies & diverse political entities towards a determined & desperate common enemy – which sounds a lot like the kind of thing we expect of someone who has to take command of the civilian leadership of a large diverse political entity like the US — & apparently I’m not alone in coming to that conclusion.

Point being: Eisenhower, Marshall, Smith, MacArthur – all of them – hell any one of them was at least as important to the outcome of WWII & the post war environment as Patton, & not one of them had more combat experience than a cup of coffee compared to Patton –or compared to McCrusty for that matter.

Moving on to the contemporary military experience, again just consider a very few names all general staff: Zinni Abizaid Petraeus & Fallon.

Incidentally: consider the ethnicity implied in the first three of those names. A sign of the times IMO. Also bear in mind the great percentage of ethnically diverse names among current US military forces in every service & at every rank. Indeed don’t lose sight of the great increase in force strength of female troops & officers in pretty much every role – including some now showing up in general staff positions.

McCrusty is from the US military tradition of father grandfather etc – but Clinton’s being a woman carries no longer carries the kind of assumed relevance to leadership capacity as in the past.

And a name like Obama is hardly out of step with the modern US military given the great number of black troops & Hispanic troops among our combat forces & our officer corps & even in our general staff. The while-in-the-service successes of Colin Powell surely put an end to any ideas to the contrary.

Even the name Hussein – there have got to be thousands in today’s US military who have someone in their family or in their circle of friends with the name Hussein & not just a few Husseins actually serving. Moreovedr I would think that an awful lot of officers in the Pentagon today would accept pretty readily that we’d be in far better shape right now if we’d had having a lot more troops with Arab Semitic names before invading Afghanistan.

Zinni made his name in the sort of military outpost diplomacy that Bob Kaplan writes about in Imperial Grunts – combat capable combat ready but not combat focussed by any stretch. Abizaid’s retired from command now but you’d have no problem finding big support for his command capacity around here or anywhere else he’s served & he too had a career arc that reflected the pre-Iraq invasion focus of peacetime force organization – more from the logistics side than Zinni though. Fallon – current commander in chief CENTCOM – he’s one up the command ladder from Petraeus – all you have to do is take a look at what he’s up to these days & you can see his focus & point of view in action – that maximizing the effectiveness of military force power doesn’t lie entirely or even mainly in using it to force that US point of view on other players on the world stage. He’s all about geopolitics & making US military presence count for something beyond killing The Enemy.

Even Petraeus – the guy’s at least as much an academic as a combat type – some would say more of a politician too [I’d say more of a self-promoting sell-out lying piece of shit – but that may be the Loyal Bushie Republican in him showing] – & his role is necessarily at least as much about diplomacy as it is about troop deployment.

Not a single one of those names owes more to Patton’s legacy than he does to those of Eisenhower & Marshall & MacArthur & Smith. Like them they’re training & their personal characters & their strengths in leadership lay in being able to perceive larger issues & the implementation of big wide-ranging strategies – negotiating with parties very often with deeply ingrained biases against the US & labouring under geographic pressures & historical circumstances which have to be acknowledged & accounted for — to preserve any chance for mission success & lasting security gains & in many ways opposed to the maintenance of our foreign policy goals & the extension of US military influence in serving those goals.

None of that brings McCrusty to mind.

All of it brings to mind Obama.

This comments is way too long but what the hell:

If Obama’s male progenitor – also Barack Hussein Obama – was himself Muslim, then it strikes me very likely that the variation would have been in the vein of either the legendary Bomba of the 1800s or someone like him: for the sub-saharan version of Islam is very dramatically different from the Sunni Arab Salafist cultural revenge line which is identified with Waterbush’ War on Terra – oops, Terror. Sub saharan Islam is the Islam of Youssou N’Dour & Ali Farka Toure – & if they are the model for future American presidents, count me in.