A Question Of Character

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.” So says Retired General Wesley Clark in an effort to undermine Sen. John McCain’s executive experience. Clark, you may remember, ran for president, and failed, in 2004 on his record as a career military officer. This was after he was fired by Bill Clinton from his post as commander of the Balkans operation for character issues. (Just what does it take to be fired by Bill Clinton, of all people, for lack of character?) So his comment, which he has not retracted, was not just morally offensive but self-discrediting.

Being shot down may not endow one with executive acumen. And being tortured doesn’t necessarily bestow upon one the presidential ‘right stuff.’ But what a man does under fire might tell us volumes about the character we may discover in him as a president.

But Clark, that shinning example of character (not), misses the point of McCain’s experience.

McCain isn’t a hero because he was tortured. He’s a hero because he declined an offer by his torturer / captors to be released, refusing to leave his fellow Americans behind.

It may not take much effort to get shot down, as McCain says of himself, but it must take a considerable act of will to consign oneself to more deprivation and torture. It must take a level of courage unknown to most people (even some retired generals) to place concern for others above one’s on interest.

One would only hope that proven self-sacrifice, courage and loyalty are valuable considerations in the choice of a president.

Barrack Hussein Obama can make no similar claim nor point to a single instance in his pampered life, personal or political, to compare with the strength of character displayed by John McCain. Although B. Hussein Obama has not fought in any wars, we have been given a glimpse of how he responds to external pressures and where he draws the line on loyalty and self-sacrifice. When it comes to friends and family, it seems that B. Hussein is only concerned for himself.

A few months ago, when the racist anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright first reared his inconvenient (to B. Hussein) head, Obama was nearly demure when he said: “I can more disown (Wright) than I can disown my own white grandmother.”

He may not have disowned his white granny, but B. Hussein didn’t exactly paint a sympathetic or loving portrait of her either. He essentially threw her under the proverbial bus, saying that she made racist remarks while he was growing up.

After several weeks of sidling away from the Rev. Wright, his self-professed ‘old uncle’ and spiritual mentor, B. Hussein threw him, and his church of which he was a member for 20 years, under the bus with granny. But why then, after all those years, did Obama finally find the door? What had changed?

B. Hussein’s degree of self-interest is what had changed! As long as the Rev. Wright was the good ‘old uncle’ and was helping Obama with his bona fides within the African-American community, it did not matter about his paranoid, racist delusional ranting and raving. Only when Wright became a potential obstacle to Obama’s personal ambition, by saying that Obama was simply behaving as a politician, did Obama show Wright the danger of standing too close to the curb at a bus stop.

Now the question is: Which example of character would you want to see in a president?

I think you know the answer!