HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
FOR GOSH SAKES YOU A**-HOLES, CHARACTER COUNTS!!!!!!!!!!
Posted, September 5, 2008,  12:01 p.m

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When Barack Obama wasn’t even a thought in his mother’s mind, and while John McCain was trouble-making with the girls, he was also, in spite of himself, learning the Art of War. That’s what you do at the Naval Academy, before you graduate.

Unexpectedly, John McCain went on to earn his doctorate in the Art of War, a five-and-a-half year long training course under the brutal tutelage of the Vietcong in a POW school in the bowels of the Hanoi Hilton. One suspects that given his choice he might have chosen a different school, but that was not to be John McCain’s fate.

A member of a military family, both his grandfather and father were four star Navy Admirals. You can say war is in MAC’s blood. Some are weaned on mother’s milk, MAC was weaned on the blood of war.

America used to celebrate its warriors; that isn’t true any longer. Since the time MAC earned his degree in Vietnam, when the youth of America en masse questioned the legitimacy of the Vietnam War, being a soldier doesn’t come with the same respect it once did.

In the Vietnam era the kids who came home from Cam Ranh Bay or survived prison camps were treated as the enemy, blamed for the errors of the country’s leaders. Thankfully, we don’t do that to our soldiers anymore. Everyone is politically correct with the mention of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, careful to point disdain at Bush and Cheney rather than the kids serving if they have a problem with the Iraq War.

Still, since the draft was discontinued and because our soldiers no longer hail from the military elite or the upper-crust of our society, but come instead from America's heartland where patriotism lives ( and sometimes only because of a scant job market which leaves no choice but for our young men and women to enlist,) Americans no longer  salute our military or see them as heroes.

Instead, Americans make dutiful nods but most have little clue as to what it means to be a soldier. Oddly, it is precisely the good work of our warriors that protects most Americans from ever personally knowing the strength of character it takes to become a fighter for America.

I was thinking this last night watching John McCain giving his acceptance speech, hardly able to raise his arms in salute to his fellow Americans applauding their nominee, permanently maimed from the beatings endured in that school in Vietnam.

My gosh, I thought, this guy standing up there, this Senator McCain, this Republican Party presidential nominee, this guy served his country with dignity and honor, put country above self, and believed so strongly in America that when given the choice to be freed for the good of the country and surely not himself, he said thanks but no thanks to his captors and endured five-and-a-half more years of hell. I mean, think about that!

"They worked me over harder than they ever had before, for a long time, and they broke me. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's."

John McCain is the real deal, a genuine American hero. Americans keep saying that we don’t make heroes anymore, but there was one standing before them and the world and it was his heroism that America seems to be dismissing, more enamored with the celebrity of Barack Obama, and now the newest “It Girl,” Sarah Palin.

So crazed is this country of ours and so confused as to what matters or what counts in the choosing of our leaders we’ve made bad choice after bad choice in picking our recent presidents. While admittedly experience isn’t everything, it counts, but character … is character not the measure of a man (woman)?

It’s become fashionable to tear down our military heroes.  How is it that a major New York Times columnist the I-am-so- bitter-and-cynical-and-I-hate-the-world, Maureen Dowd, got away with writing an unseemly column in which she dared to question MAC’s using that life-framing, character-building God-awful POW experience to explain who he is to the world with nary a word uttered in MAC’s defense?

Where has former Presidential contender and old friend of John McCain’s, John Kerry, now an Obama supporter, been in all of this, he, never the hero MAC is, but surely a good soldier? Kerry lost his bid for the Presidency after being Swift-boated by members of his own crew. I’ll tell you where John Kerry has been, lost in the character-lacking partisan wars. Kerry has been selling-out his longtime friend to the Democratic Party leaders. John McCain, Kerry says has “changed in the pursuit of power.” Maybe the Swift boaters were right about John Kerry.

When was it America began placing ideology, which is the same as personal need, over country? When did we begin dismissing the notion that a person’s character is the measure by which we hold them to account? When did we begin casting our presidential vote over a women’s right to choose instead of marking our ballot for the person who will put country before ideology?  When did we become so defeated that the innocuous call to change became our answer to our problems rather than a real solution to our problem?

American’s cry and our politicians answer by telling their constituents what they want to hear, ”I’ll have us out of Iraq within 10 months after I take office. “No more pork-barrel spending.” “I’ll bring change.” “”I’ve made a career of standing up to the establishment.” I guess you say what you have to in order to get elected if you believe you really can help America as its leader.

But those cries are people saying we hurt and those tears of complaint are only symptomatic of a larger ill. This country is suffering from a character crisis and more than anything what this country needs is to focus on the restoration of America’s values: honor, integrity, the kind of values found in a wise, old warrior who don’t give great speeches, but say real things. “We lost their [the American people’s] trust, when we valued our power over our principles, McCain said last night. Boring? Maybe. Substantive? Yes.

There’s an old saying, “Every new broom sweeps clean, but the old brush knows all the corners.

America will continue to treat its symptoms: fix the economy, shore up Social Security, alter our positions on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, rebuild our infrastructure, overturn or not  Roe vs. Wade; the list goes on and on. Still, this country will be left with the cause of its illness: a government no longer bound to its core principles.

In 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.”

America, it’s back to square one. May the most principled man and woman win, if you can find either one in the haze of all that glitter out there.