to use our troops as props, to invoke them repeatedly to make a case for passing legislation to take Constitutional freedoms away from the American people, and to win elections, then to follow that up by cutting benefits, to invoke "stop-loss" rules to prevent reservists from retiring, to send them on multiple deployments that fall one day short each of invoking GI bill benefits, to bring them home shattered and to allow them to sit in filth while awaiting their discharges minus a few body parts, then to have the gall to vote to kill the new GI bill to keep them in perpetual servitude.

WHEN are the American military personnel going to wake up and realize that the Repugs support them in word only, NEVER in deed?

The key here is McCain was an officer ... a career officer ... a Naval Academy grad. This is not about McCain the Republican or McCain who married a rich beer distributors daughter. McCain was trained to see enlisted personnel as his inferiors. The military is a vestige of feudalism with noble knights (officers) and commoners (enlisted personnel). What used to be called "officers and men" don't eat together, play together or socialize (the latter is called "fraternization" and it can get you court martialed). In the navy, officers and enlisted personnel even wear distinctly different uniforms. In the Air Force, both classes wear small US pins on their lapels but on the pin for enlisted personnel, the pin is surrounded by big zero (which shows airmen how the service regards them).

A military legend when I was in the draft military tells that one evening Ike (career officer, West Point grad) went out to dinner at a fancy DC restaurant and saw an Army enlisted man eating there. He went back and vetoed a pay raised for enlisted personnel assuming that if a "grunt" could eat there, GIs did not need the pay raise.

During Viet Nam, McCain's war, Army infantrymen used to "frag" their officers (accidently toss a fragmentation grenade in their direction during combat). Since most of the population has never been subject to the draft and has no military experience, you probably won't understand why this sort of thing happened. In the movies, officers are always so handsome, heroic, noble and good looking and those funny little enlisted men always played by character actors are so respectful and so happy to serve them. Not unlike how Whites and Blacks are portrayed in "Gone With The Wind" and other old movies.

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The GI bill helped me get a bachelors degree after service during the Vietnam era. As a result I now have a graduate degree and work as a mental health professional. In the 1960's I knew my generation was duped into fighting in an illegal invasion of a country, just as this generation is in Iraq. I did not always think that way, but I researched, analyzed, and paid attention.

McCain, by his training, was, and is, incapable of seeing that he almost died for lies, and still supports Bush adninistration lies, even the most poorly concealed and transparant. If he cannot see these falsehoods, he is not capable of holding any high office.

I would never, ever, support this incompetent man.