West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV issued a formal apology to John McCain yesterday for making the following claim: "McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,ooo feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into these issues."
In his apology, Rockefeller offers up the standard bullshit about McCain's military service as proof he's a real American hero, blah blah blah, but really, what did Rockefeller say that was inaccurate?
Apparently, McCain's years as a POW absolve him from any responsibility for his actions while he was in the military. And yes, those actions did involve firebombing Vietnamese villages, killing untold numbers of civilians. We could argue all day about the morality of that, but the fact is, massive civilian casualties are the cost of modern warfare.
The terms of the debate here in America regarding the ungoing quagmire in Iraq involve bringing our men and women home, not the thousands and thousands of brown-skinned people killed by the hands of Our Noble Troops. In constructing his half-baked analogy (his point was apparently that McCain is out of touch with the concerns of common folk, or some such), Rockefeller unintentionally uttered a truth we dare not consider.
Naturally he had to apologize, so we can all pretend it never happened, and never think such troubling thoughts again.
