Please Stop Shoving McCain's POW Status Down Our Throats

It's been 24 hours and I still have a headache from listening to that non entertaining, non substantive Republican Presidential nomination acceptance speech by John McCain on Thursday night. There was nothing really interesting about McCain's speech except a very detailed description of him being a POW in North Vietnam, except to me it was uninteresting because we heard the summarized version during a few of the keynote speeches in the previous nights of the convention. Throughout the convention "Country First" along with John McCain's POW status became a central theme as if McCain's POW status made him the best candidate to be President of the United States.

I know some of you reading this may call me "unpatriotic", but honestly and seriously is someone being a POW a major qualifier to be President of the United States? I think not. We thank McCain for his service during Vietnam, but please let's not politicize it. It reminded of the Republicans politicizing 9/11 during the 2004 Bush re-election campaign. Simply disgusting. I was waiting for McCain to criticize the use of torture after his POW story because the use of torture is a danger to National Security and also because he himself was tortured, but nothing. And supposedly this is the guy that is breaking away from Bush? This must be the "maverick" in coming out in McCain to pander to the much bigger neocons because he once was against waterboarding, and in February 2008 he voted against a ban on waterboarding.

I hope for the rest of the campaign McCain's POW status wont be used as a tool to gain votes, but just as biographical information. What the RNC did during this past week was disgusting, but you know as well as I do nobody had the guts to call them out on it's politicization except Wesley Clark. After that Wesley Clark was basically black balled by the Obama campaign and they told him not to come to the DNC because his services weren't needed. I'm sure they agreed with Clark, but Barack Obama is too gutless to say it himself.

Every time the McCain campaign uses McCain's POW status as a tool to gain votes we know it's a tactic to stray away from talking about actual issues like let's say the economy, health care, or Iraq.

Dre