Putting McCain's "Cross in the Dirt Story" in Perspective

Great, impassioned rant at Riehl World View on the contrast between John McCain and Barack Obama, and the depths to which the left is willing to sink in order to trash an American hero, one of the few we've got left.

I Honestly Can't Believe I'm Reading This

What is quite well known beyond ANY shadow of a doubt is that Senator John McCain spent five years in captivity for serving his country during which time he was brutalized to such a severe extent that he still carries the scars and handicap from that captivity.

What is also well known beyond any shadow of a doubt is that Senator Barack Obama had some form of long-standing tie to an unrepentant domestic terrorist - but we can't know the extent of those ties because the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago is blocking access to the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

And all Andrew Sullivan and a significant number of new media members on the Left care about is whether or not a North Vietnamese prison guard drew a cross in the sand with a stick some 40 years ago?

Sorry, but are you people f~&/ing insane? Do you not have any sense of what country you actually live in today? Do you really not understand why America has rejected your presidential candidates at the ballot box in so many elections over these last forty or so years?

Read the whole thing (there's not much beyond what I've quoted) except for the opening, which quotes Andrew Sullivan and provides the spark for what follows. On a side note, I remember back when I first became interested in politics, back when W was running against Gore, I was in college, interning in the House of Representatives, and I began reading and following a number of blogs, trying to learn everything I could about politics and our country and the men who were leading it.

One of the bloggers that I read religiously was Andrew Sullivan. His writing was incisive, well-reasoned, and largely free from hyperbole and generalization, all the traits that seem to seperate writers (particularly bloggers) on the right from those on the left. His change of heart and mind since that time has been depressing to witness, to say the least. I completely understand that people's world views change, particularly when a major aspect of one's life (his sexuality) is seen as abnormal or wrong by a fair number of those you're working with.

It must have been extremely difficult to maintain his relatively conservative stance in the face of those in the gay community and on the left who called him traitor, and much worse, and his courage at the time was one of the things that drew me to his writing, but the drastic shift in the quality of his thinking and writing since his "conversion" to the left has been remarkable, and tough to watch.