They tell us that John McCain is an appealing candidate because he has national security credentials. I am trying to figure out exactly what it means to have strong national security credentials and I was hoping that someone could help me out.
How exactly can a man that cheered an invasion of Iraq which resulted in a million dead bodies and an occupation with no end in sight have national security credentials? How can we trust a man who stood up and hugged George Bush after he slaughtered the children of a nation and turned the world against us to stand up for what is right? How can we trust a man who decided that the best way to get help to New Orleans when it was drowning was to eat birthday cake with the very man who was supposed to be working on getting federal resources to the people of New Orleans?
Apparently the people who our media thinks have strong national security credentials are the ones who believe it is perfectly okay to sit and eat cake while an American drowns. They believe that the people who have strong national security credentials are the people who get the rest of the world pissed off at us. According them we all should feel safer if we bomb a few Iraqi children, because if we just kill a few children we are supposed to believe that the fathers of those children will feel no need to retaliate. After all we are giving them freedom, freedom from their children. And they wonder why the Iraqi people are not grateful.
What kind of world do we live in when a man who supported a massacre is believed to have national credentials, while those who were right about the disaster that would come if we bombed Iraq and spoke out against war are marginalized? Apparently all it takes to have national security credentials is the ability to pump your fist in the air and yell “USA! USA! USA!” while people are being killed. You don't have to be right about anything, you don't have to actually keep America safe, all you have to do is blindly support the military machine.
There is only one way to have national security, and that is to have peace. No one who supports the occupation of Iraq has any national security credentials. I don't care what Senate committees they sit on, I don't care what kind of medals they have pinned to their chest, I don't care how much they claim to love America, if they support the continued killing overseas then they are making America less safe.
If John McCain has national security credentials then we are handing out credentials way too easily, because John McCain's views on what constitutes national security are absolutely insane. Why can't we have a rule that if someone is wrong about such a major national security consideration as going to war then they need to lose their credentials? Why do we keep insisting that someone who has been proven wrong on just about everything he has ever said about the occupation of Iraq still has credentials to be taken seriously when he proposes how he can stabilize Iraq?
I don't care what our talking heads try to say, the only thing John McCain has credentials in is finding ways to get in bed with the lobbyists.