McCain Attacks Every Presidential Candidate Since Teddy Roosevelt

The most pithy, and pungent sound from John McCain after the Potomac primaries, is this:

"Hope, my friends is a powerful thing. I can attest to that better than many. … [But] to encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.

Read it. Read it over and again.

McCain embraces hope.

He knows the meaning of hope, undoubtedly from his horrid confinement in a barbaric Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

The setup complete, he launches into the heart of his argument. Obama has only the rhetoric, only the offer of hope and a better future. Preferable to Obama's rhetoric is the sound and proven ideas, clearly the one's that he, McCain, espouses.

Wrong.

I am willing to try an untested vision of America, based on justice, fairness and understanding rather than a policy that dragged us into two disastrous wars within two generations, destroyed public education, and allowed corporations to loot and pillage, leaving millions of pensioners penniless.

Those wars were not just military disasters. They have taken our nation off course, strangled our liberties and driven much of the rest of the world into the arms of fanatics and terrorists who do not know our goodness.

Every candidate for president since Teddy Roosevelt has offered hope. Some were charlatans, like Harding, with nothing more that a wad of lobbyists' dollars hidden between their legs. Others, like Jimmy Carter, were dreamers who did not understand the character of those would collaborate with terrorists in order to gain the White House.

Some were like FDR, with the courage to believe in the vision of America held by the people who elected them.

Comments

[kr]

What many people don't know is that FDR in 1932 essentially ran on no program to fight the Depression, other than campaigning on balancing the budget.

[Bill Swan]

Couldn't have said it any better. Looking forward to Nov.

[Neaguy]

As I recall, McCain was part of the Keating Five. That should have ended his career as a holier than thou politician. It would have in a decent world. Then again we should not forget all the bombs he dropped on Vietanamese families in an assault on that country that so frightened anti communist French journalist Bernard Fall that he felt the Vietnam as a historic entity might cease to exist.

[Mary Schmidt]

Well, as evidenced by Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and JFK (man on the moon by 1969 and we didn't even have some of the technology yet) - you've got to have rhetoric or you'll never have the reality.

After two presidential terms based on preaching fear - hope is a good message, regardless of the pitch, from left or right.