Left Smears McCain's Military Service as "Wrong Code" for Office

We already know the left's in full battle mode with its smears against John McCain as a "warmonger."

It should be no surprise, then, to see the beginning of a new delegitimization campaign against the Arizona Senator's service to country. McCain's family "honor" of military service is being attacked as "the wrong code for directing national policy":

The question is this: will America sacrifice herself to vindicate the personal sense of honor of one man? If there were no war, Senator McCain might be a good president. With the Iraq war going on, however, there is an overriding reason to vote against McCain in 2008 ... The reason to vote against McCain, paradoxically, is McCain's military experience. I'm not referring to his experience with military affairs, but the personal military experiences that shaped him....

The problem is that McCain doesn't see himself as a civilian. He was, is and will always be defined in his own mind by the code of military service. This would be a great quality in a general or perhaps in a peacetime president, but will be disastrous in wartime. There is a reason our founders wanted America's military to have dispassionate civilian leadership.

McCain thinks of himself in terms of honor, service and sacrifice. These laudable abstract spiritual ideas are a terrific quality in officers leading last stands or in medics attending the battlefield wounded. But honor, service and sacrifice are the wrong code for directing national policy....

McCain would bring both a historical perspective and psychological needs to the presidency. Simply put, McCain does not want to be the president that presides over today's Iraqi equivalent of the mass exit from the rooftop of Saigon's American embassy.

This is an extreme characterization of McCain's "psychological needs."

Throughout American history military service has been considered an asset for aspirants to the Oval Office. Recall that John F. Kennedy's call to "pay any price" for the survival of liberty gained more power and legitimacy by the fact that the 35th president was a highly-decorated World War II veteran of the Pacific war.

I see this delegitimization campaign as frankly of an extension of the radical left's hatred of the American military itself, with McCain now posited as the most visible and reviled symbol of that institution's place in American political history.

For an interesting, and not completed unrelated debate, see Ann Althouse, "McCain is "implicitly attacking Obama for basking in self-glory, when the Obama campaign is very much predicated on 'we' and not 'I.'"