I care that he finished at the bottom of his class. I expect my leaders to be of superior intellect and caliber and to have a overarching committment to success in all their endeavors.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:47 am Add Karma Recommend (0) | Report Abuse

CulturWarrior Responds:

That’s great that you care that he finished at the bottom of his class, but that’s not the issue here. Since you can’t debate the subject of this story, you have to resort to smearing McCain by latching onto the fact that he finished at the bottom of his Naval Academy class. I think this started out as an attempt to smear him for alleged plagiarism. It was pointed out that McCain doesn’t actually write his speeches and that the speechwriter should be held accountable for any plagiarism. Since, by some miracle, y’all appear to realize that fact, all y’all can do, in a desperate attempt to still smear McCain, is latch on to some irrelevant issue.

Time to ban some more trolls.

TripleKick 9 will be TripleKick 10 by the end of the day.

Oh goody, Then we can call her Trippy_10_”Cheeto fingers”!

It’s not PLAGIARISM when I mix-N-match sentences… is it?
Just ask Cindi how that recipe works. “Your recipe says to cream the butter THEN add the egg, mine says to ADD the beaten egg to the creamed butter… See the difference? I thought so. Now watch me become Miss Cowchip… Where’s that banana for my talent show?”

.

This is dumb. First of all, McCain does not write his own speeches, so if y’all are gonna attack anyone, go after the speechwriter and stop smearing McCain.

I heard the audio of McCain giving his “speech” and he struck me as sounding just like a junior high school kid reading a report…………now I see the same level of intellectual depth was used in the writing of it.
This guy finished 494th out of 499 in his class at the Naval Academy.
HASN’T THE BUSH PRESIDENCY TAUGHT US ANYTHING?!?

We don’t need another President that people would like to have a beer with.
We need a President who has the intellectual capacity to play the game of geopolitics and not play checkers while adversaries and “allies” are playing chess.

Translation: “Hey, you guys, look over there! Over there! Aw, c’mon, you guys! Look! Look! Over there … you guys ….”

Yet the trolls turn a blind eye to an administration that has mislead us into war (WMD, anyone?) resulting in the deaths of thousands of our finest men and women (and gawd knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens), has outed a covert CIA agent, that spied on us illegally, that condones torture.

No sorry, I am wrong. I am not humored. I’m saddened!

Alex Jones also talks with professor Michel Chossudovsky about the unfolding conflict in Georgia which according to Chossudovsky were carried out using aerial bombardments and ground attacks largely directed against civilian targets including residential areas, hospitals and the university resulting in the destruction of the provincial capital Tskhinvali and in some 1500 civilian deaths.

http://www.radiodujour.com/chossudovsky_michel

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/27/mccain-plagiarism/

which was derived from a comment of mine in reaction to this post:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/26/embargoed-mccains-speech-to-the-los-angeles-world-affairs-council/#comment-4520770

in which I stated:
“McCain is plagiarizing an Adniral and recycling some of his words from 2004.
McCain today: I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.”
a) Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, July 4 1996–Seawolf Assoc. speech :
“…to the Navy for sending us to war. At the same time, none of us feel that in Vietnam there is a romantic remembrance. War is awful and when nations seek to resolve their differences by fighting, a million tragedies ensue. Look at Bosnia today. The story line should be hatred and ignorance. War is wretched beyond description. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought, nor the cause with which it serves can glorify war. Neither do we share the exhilaration of combat ”
http://www.seawolf.org/assn/ziemer.asp
b) McCain, speech at the RNC in NY, 2004
War is an awful business. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of statecraft are endangered as the demands of war and diplomacy conflict.However just the cause, we should shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. But there is no avoiding this war. We tried that, and our reluctance cost us dearly. And while this
war has many components, we can’t make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct.
That is not just an expression of our strength. It’s a measure of our wisdom.”

As things turned out it was McCain who was the victim of plagiarism, by a fellow Navy officer no less. TP then apologized for the erroneous claim that was generated, but not declared as FACT to them, by me. And given the subsequent result tha McCain was simply re-hashing one of his old public addresses TP apologized for the error.
Furthermore I, as the source of an accusation, explained how I had come to suspect McCain of plagiarism through the resources available to me , also bowed to the facts and apologized. For the likes of Triplekick however, publicly available intelligence isn’t an excuse for mistaken judgment when it comes to a speech, but exclusive and unverifiable intelligence is perfectly acceptable when it comes to invading a country and no apologies for the cited cause when proven to be without foundation, are necessary.

I subsequently wrote several additional comments explaining in more detail how I arrived at my charges of plagiarism and also explained how they should be ignored given additional information that I was not privy-to and could not examine at the time and with the resources I had that I used to the fullest extent possible.

I’d suggest a documentary comparison with any Right-wing blog regarding how an erroneuos claim was generated and promoted and what kind of explanations and apologies resulted, once proven false.

Here;s an excerpt of the follow-up from the original charge

In an update TP remarked that “the Huffington Post noted yesterday, portions of McCain’s World Affairs Council speech were recycled from a pre-war speech the senator gave in 2001.”

In the second TP update, TP noted that “It appears that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer — in 1995. We regret the error.”

Consequentially as the originator of the charge of plagiarism, I then explained how I arrived at my claim:

Quote: #110 As noted I brought this to TP’s attention. I spent hours yesterday trying to find the original quote with the only tool I had available–Google. I did an advanced search on:
“Not the valor with which it is fought” ,
and got 148 hits ( yesterday) . I looked at about 50 of the sites linked, on news sites and blogs and websites and all those I saw attributed the words to McCain and all that I saw were later than Adm. Ziemer’s use of the words.
I thought it very possible that Zeimer was the original source—BUT not abosulutely. After all the phrases in question are IMHO examples of great writing and eloquence, and I was pretty certain not McCain’s style. Nor however did the words seem likely to have come from Ziemer, in my estimation. But as far as I could tell Ziemer used them first.
TP took-up my observations and spent much of today verifying my research and confirming my suspicions.

Now the plagiarizm charge appears to have been reversed. The link provided in the update did not appear to show up in my specific Google search. I didn’t notice any link to McCain’s website in the returns I got from Google–they all appeared to be general blog posts and reiterations of the words relating to the latest Mar 29 2007 speech.
Now if you advance search the phrase, there are 371 links ( I just tried it). I guess I though checking 50 out of a hundred possible source constituted due diligence. Apparently not. I didn’t present my original research as irrefutable fact, but rather a high probaability that deserved further investigation.

Nonetheless, I think it fair I too apoligize for having instigated this report, given it’s results.
The larger issue of plagiarism still remains, but in this instance it appears McCain is the victim of it, and the victim of, not so much a rush to judgement on my part, but on an amount of research I thought was pretty substantial, but which turned out to be insufficient.
So I aplogize once again for that.

When it was clear my charges of palgiarism were contested I retraced my steps to see where I had gone wrong:

#130
To all…
I just tried Google search on the EXACT phrase
“When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms”
Gogle delivers 150 results. NOT ONE OF THEM points to McCain’s Senate site. Therein in lies the problem. In my original search McCain;s Senate site was likewise never flagged. It didn’t occur to me that Google wouldn;t find EVERY instance if the phrase that is available on the web. It didn’t occur to me to go to McCain’s web site and search all the speeches there–it has basic topic/date search tool of its own.
TP told me that they would investigate and substantiate my claims before commiting to a post. They told me they had contacted McCain’s people to get a comment/response before the post went up. Frankly I was rather surprised that my suspicions and research had apparently become ‘fact.’
And actually the first I saw of it was with the update and the 1995 link–which I hadn’t missed in my original research, I-or rather Google-simply wasn’t able to find it.
So there’s the cautionary tale.

Why Google STILL can’t deliver the link to the 1995 speech McCain senate page I don’t know. My suspicions were substantiated by the evidence I COULD find,…
…but when I sent the tip I didn’t argue that I had an ireefutable case, just hwat seemd to be a good one.
I don’t like the McCains politics, but this plagiarism charge shouldn’t be used against him–beccaue, unless there’s some other evidence out there, it’s not, in fact true.

http://traitorjoe.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/mcbush_2.jpg