Wes Has Fun Storming The Castle

03 Jul, 2008 by Ed Driscoll

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Wesley Clark certainly stepped in it over the weekend, Ed Morrissey writes:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:

Jim Geraghty notes that Clark’s slur is one of eight attacks on McCain’s military service by surrogates of the Obama campaign:

Is anyone else sensing a sharper edge to Team McCain since Wes Clark became Democrat Number Seven and Rand Beers became Democrat Number Eight in speaking critically of John McCain’s service in Vietnam?

“Mr. Beers’ remarks are part of a pattern of Obama supporters attacking John McCain’s military service, and a reminder of why it’s what Sen. Obama, his supporters and his campaign actually do that matters most,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers tells ABC News. “Sen. Obama speaking out against these attacks isn’t really relevant — either his supporters aren’t hearing him or they don’t believe his words.”

It’s really nice that Obama said today that “no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign.” It’s also meaningless if everyone else in the Democratic party ignores him. Barack Obama doesn’t have total control of the actions and words of every surrogate, but after the eighth instance, without any major consequence beyond a spokesman saying that Obama “rejects” the surrogate’s statement, it starts to look like a deliberate and cynical good cop/bad cop routine. Let’s see the candidate himself calling out his supporters by name. Let’s see some heads rolling — was Samantha Power’s declaration that Hillary was a “monster” really that much worse? (Team McCain ditched Cunningham over using Obama’s middle name.)

As Orrin Judd noted on Sunday, “The poor Democrats still think John Kerry lost because his service to his country was attacked, rather than his disservice.”

We looked at a few of the previous attacks on McCain’s service in a mid-May edition of Silicon Graffiti:

In a related development, John Hinderaker spots a pair of attempts to make these attacks seem bipartisan:

Politico–and still more the anonymous Yahoo News headline writer!–know that attacks on McCain’s service by the Obama campaign and other Democrats are poisonous and likely to backfire. So they are trying to give the Democrats cover by creating the misleading impression that these disgusting smears are somehow bipartisan.

Read the rest, complete with a screen capture of Yahoo’s headline.

Originally posted on Monday at Ed Driscoll.com. Since then, James Webb became yet another Obama surrogate to make a negative reference towards McCain’s military service, though Jim Geraghty is willing to make, as he says, “A Halfhearted Effort to Defend Jim Webb.”