John McCain has reached Guiliani territory, where he or his campaign makes a reference to his POW experience as an excuse for every issue that comes up. I don't know if there's a single issue, no matter how far removed from Viet Nam, that McCain hasn't played the POW card. It's getting old now, and it'll get a lot older towards November. (Also, for the record, this thread is not about Obama, or Kerry, or Clinton, or Romney, or anyone except John McCain.)
Concerning the S&L scandal:
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Even the Vietnamese didn't question my ethics
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When he was accused to being a carpetbagger during his first race:
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"I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."
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From his campaign concerning the the recent charge that he might have cheated at Saddleback:
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"The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,"
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From his campaign concerning the recent housing flap:
Concerning Elizabeth Edwards' call for Universal Healthcare
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"It's a cheap shot, but I did have a period of time where I didn't have very good healthcare, I had it from another government"
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Concerning his love of ABBA:
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"I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again."
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Concerning Clinton's Woodstock Bill
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"Now my friends, I wasn't there," McCain said of the rock-and-roll festival. "I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was, I was tied up at the time."
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Concerning Patriotism
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"In the prison camps of North Vietnam, there weren't Republicans or Democrats, there were just patriots."
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As an aside, here's two of my other favorite McCain quotes:
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"One of the things I've never tried to do is exploit my Vietnam service to my country because it would be totally inappropriate to do so."
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"[I'm] sick and tired of re-fighting" the Vietnam War.
"It's offensive to me, and it's angering to me that we're doing this," he said. "It's time to move on."
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McCain Reflects on His POW Experience | The Trail | washingtonpost.com CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - McCain rises to ABBA’s defense « - Blogs from CNN.com The POW Dodge | The American Prospect Bloomberg.com: Politics POW status was key factor in McCain's first race - Boston.com http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/us...=1&oref=slogin