(Pacé, Dune Fans.)
This video is a compendium from Think Progress of John McCain’s performance last week during one of the hearings on ending DADT.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOuoz6JXzRE[/youtube]
Did you notice everything that McCain has rejected here?
- Any notion of operational Chain of Command
- Listening to our commanders on the ground, and
- Civilian control of the military. Unless that civilian is McCain, one presumes. (via an interview with Howard Kurtz)
But McCain is indulging in semantics when it comes to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. In 2006, he said on MSNBC that “the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.” Now that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supports the Pentagon’s move toward junking DADT—and even McCain’s wife, Cindy, has appeared in a gay rights group’s video opposing the policy—the senator is blocking Obama’s plan.
“I understand that’s his commitment to the gay and lesbian community,” McCain says. But while a Pentagon study released Tuesday found more than two-thirds support for the change among service members and said disruptions would be minimal, McCain wants a broader study that would focus on combat readiness.
His explanation: “The Marine commandant is opposed to [dropping] Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know for a fact the other three service chiefs have serious reservations.”
As for their superiors, McCain casually mentions the commander in chief and defense secretary, “neither of which I view as a military leader.”
What Democrat would get away with these dangerous claims about military operations? Right. Yet here is McCain, just everywhere, passing off his old man grumpiness as some informed view on DADT. All the while, he changes the goalposts on those views which he is hardly held accountable for. Yet his view that the military ought to have some special vote or some special say about DADT (when they did NOT have any such consultation on whether or not to go to Iraq or Afghanistan) — pretty much bypassing the men and women who are paid to lead them and paid to take tough decisions on their behalf — is going largely unchallenged.
McCain should no longer be the face of Senate oversight of the military if he is willing to disgrace himself and the institution he claims to care for so much, largely because it is apparent that the bigotry that he was expecting from the ranks and from much of the military leadership failed to materialize. Real American patriots understand that the country’s path towards inclusion for everyone is often a long and trying one, but the long arc of our own history shows that we get there sooner or later. Time for McCain to stop fighting this history and take his old man’s bigotry off to the old folks home where it can’t do any damage.