If Washington D.C. were a country, children in bad 80s movies everywhere would spend time memorizing its exports and principle industries. Its economic mainstay would of course be bullshit. The exporting of bullshit. The manufacture of bullshit. The preparation and spoon-feeding of bullshit. Should it get any worse, I’ll have to add windshield wipers to my television screen to periodically scrape it clean. Who’s more patriotic? Who wears what pin while attending which church? Whose dick is bigger? Perhaps the answers to some of these questions actually matter; it is possible. It does matter that the only way that anyone will get the truth on any of these questions is to turn off the goddamn TV and think about it for a second. Balance out all of the things that you heard and draw an opinion.

So let’s talk about this McCain/Wesley Clark bullshit. Wesley Clark, excuse me, GENERAL Wesley Clark was on Face The Nation a few days ago. He had the nerve (according to Republicans and the media) to question one of the lines that McCain and his supporters have trumpeted into FACT over the last eighteen months or so. Namely, that McCain’s military service AUTOMATICALLY qualifies him to be the President of the United States. He didn’t say that it disqualified him. He didn’t say that it didn’t matter. He didn’t say that this nation wasn’t grateful for his distinguished service. He didn’t say that we’d be better off with a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, hippie. Not a single one of these things were said though you’d think he did if you didn’t see the original clip.

Admittedly, there were more thought-out, articulate, and calculated ways that Clark could have said this, but it’s clear to anyone who sees it that, though he fumfered a bit like a ‘tard, he was trying to raise an important point. John McCain is not inherently more qualified than Obama to be president because he spent some time in a tiger cage being tortured. Does it add to his qualifications? Certainly it does. You can see through this experience, and his reactions to it, that he’s a genuine American hero with strong character and convictions.

Could you also argue that his time in a tiger cage is a negative? I think that you could. You could say that his temper and his tendency to fly off the handle were influenced by his time as a POW. You could say that throwing him into the pressure cooker of the Oval Office would further enflame these tendencies that may have in fact been borne of his military service. Would I? Probably not. Did Wesley Clark? No, of course he didn’t.

The point is that you could. If you can reasonably make an argument for EACH side of an issue, then clearly it’s debatable. Possibly it makes people uncomfortable, but the discomfort really comes from the spin and ‘analysis’, nay extrapolation, from the media. Wesley Clark doesn’t hate veterans; he is one. Michelle Obama doesn’t hate America. Barack Obama is a patriot. You can support the troops without canonizing them or thinking that being shot at will automatically transform them into the next leaders of the free world.