The Honorable John McCain Broke 9/11 "No Campaign" Pledge. But Who Would Notice?

Brad Shober, the deputy fire chief for the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department, was called to the scene on 9/11 and has returned each year for the ceremonies. "I'm impressed with the turnout," he said. "I hope most of them are here for the passengers and not John McCain."  -- SHANKSVILLE: McCain joins mourners at Flight 93 'homecoming'/ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Noreen Grimm of Avonmore in Westmoreland County, Pa., made the trip knowing she would see McCain in person for the first time. She sported patriotic tennis shoes, a McCain/Sarah Palin button and carried a homemade sign "Hockey Moms for McCain and Palin...."  -- Sen. McCain Visits Shanksville Crash Site/ Wheeling News Register

I don't see how John McCain can call his stealth appearance at the Shanksville memorial ceremony early yesterday anything but a campaign appearance.  He was there with full press in attendance, he gave a speech, mingled with the families and he pressed the flesh with the crowd.

According to the Post-Gazette story, Mccain "arrived early and stayed late, accompanied by his wife, Cindy, to shake hands and pose for pictures with the victims' families."  (Consequently, here you see Barack Obama and Mayor Bloomberg killing time at Ground Zero waiting for McCain to arrive for the officially agreed upon non-politicized joint commemoration.)  In addition, Governor Rendell, in his address to the crowd, took the opportunity to commend "Mr. McCain's own heroism while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam."

Still, the media, although disseminating touching visual documentation like the image above, will not go there because -- beyond the fact the campaigns agreed, in advance, not to politicize 9/11 -- McCain, who stands here before at least sixteen American flags and the artifacts of the dead -- is universally recognized as an American hero and an honorable man.

(image 1:  Jason Cohn/Reuters. September 11, 2008.  Flight 93 Temporary Memorial outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. linked image:Shannon Stapleton/AFP/Getty. New York)

Comments

[La Cabeza]

"In addition, Governor Rendell, in his address to the crowd, took the opportunity to commend 'Mr. McCain's own heroism while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.'"

It's time to retire *that* old saw, too. What does his status as a former POW have to do with being able to govern? "Hello, Mr McCain? Monopoly called and they want their 'get out of jail free' card back!"

[bacaangel]

Republicans Hijacked 911, by Keith Olberman on 9/11! Courage to Speak Truth!

http://www.jedreport.com/2008/09/special-commen...

Never again should a President you want to have a beer with be allowed to lie the American public into a False & Phony war and ignore the real war as George W. Bush was able too! National Security strength, I don't think so, after all 911 happened on the Republicans' watch, but they distorted that message too and you would think that Democrats are weak on national security! Politicans who lie to the public are engaged in a betrayal of the public trust and such distortion should be deemed unethical and in some cases, criminal!

And, it is an outrage or should be that the government can give millions of dollars to CEO’s from the failed Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and yet, cannot give a second stimulus check to American citizens in these hard economic times?

Republicans say No to a second stimulus while the Democrats say Yes to a second stimulus!

Is the Republican Congress working for CEO’s or are they working for you, the people?

[KansasKowboy]

During his speech there he suggested that the passengers of that jet may have saved his life because the target of that jet was believed to have been the Senate Building. I was wondering if McCain had actually been in that building on 9-11-2001. I wonder if someone can check this out.

[onesentence]

He is no longer an honorable man. He has allowed his campaign to lie over and over. He knows Obama didn't call Palin a pig and he knows the other ads are full of lies and misleading implications. He doesn't care. He wants to win and if he has to win dirty that is fine by him. I can't believe I used to think he was all right for a Republican. He betrayed us all the day he chose someone who not only has no foreign policy experience but also has NO INTEREST in foreign policy the same way I have no interest in football. Except that she might be President and her lack of interest combined with her vanity and vindictivenes might end up blowing up the world.

[dogfood]

Not quite univerally. I don't think he's honorable. I think he's a vicious liar.

[Samantha]

As Barack Obama has said, "did you think this would be easy?" The world did not change just because we found our candidate and Bush's ratings are low.

Have we forgotten the Rove years? The swiftboating, the "kill it before it grows" predatorial strategy of the GOP? None of this has gone away. The best we can hope for this year is for the public to be sick of it, for Barack to offer a viable alternative, and the votes to be cast. We will win this election, looking at the electoral map. That gives us 4 years. But beyond that, nothing is guaranteed.

If you want more, then you're looking at an expensive, organized effort to win the culture war and buy back some major media outlets. That seems like a huge task, but we have little choice, because we've let too many election cycles go by without addressing GOP gains. Over the years, they've successfully moved the center to the right, and that leaves us stranded.

Whoever it was who said that we can't let "community organizer" to go the way of "trial lawyers" was 100 percent right. How many progressive-friendly groups, and how many liberal or even moderate concepts do you think we can afford to have discredited and still survive as a party? What is left?

The answer is, not much. The public finds it very hard wrapping their mind around complex and boring economic issues, energy issues, health care issues, etc. But that seems to be all we have left as a political party, because the minute we use words like "liberal, secularism, separation of church and state, equality, patriotism, freedom of speech, economic fairness, unions, teacher unions, women's rights, civil rights, etc, etc, the GOP buries us, because they have OWNED and/or DEFINED those words or groups for us.

This is why we have failed every 4 years. And this is why only Obama so far has had some success, with an attractive personality, and a message of hope and future, deliberately vague and very broad in order to avoid the potholls in the road his own party has left for him.

The absolute key to GOP success is that they carry their gains over election cycles, not just a single one. Like a snowball their memes gain weight and speed, until all you can do is get out of the way.

If anyone had any dreams of the dawning of a new progressive day in 2008, and a new way of politics for america, I hope now has woken up, after looking at the poll numbers. There is no dawn, until we do the necessary work to make it so. Until we make our own snowballs.

[jean]

Samantha, ignoring the picture above for a bit, the BIG picture is a campaign that is looking beyond this election, registering hundreds of thousands of Democrats. Obama is investing in the future of the Democratic Party. The r's did it twenty, thirty years ago (or more, with think tanks) and look what they did. Obama and Dean are the first Dems in a long time to look hard at party-building (I think). Voter registration has always been a bit of an afterthought. After all, no members, no voters, no party. The 50 state strategy is somewhat new to the Democratic leadership. Many apparently still believe it won't work. I think its brilliant, and a no-brainer. Just remember: there are so many MORE of us now.

[Lev]

I am trying to put this as gently as possible and I beg your pardon if you may find this offensive but it has to be said. Surely you (at this blog) had to have found out at least the basic details of the Shanksville incident which brings me to my question: Doesn’t it seem more than a little unbelievable (actually downright preposterous) that a Boeing 757 would take off for a coast-to-coast flight carrying such a tiny amount of passengers?

The Flight 93 memorial site states the same passenger figures heard everywhere else: “All 33 passengers and seven crew members were killed.”
http://www.honorflight93.org/story/

Thirty-three passengers? We aren’t talking about a small business jet but a Boeing 757 airliner. It isn’t as if a Boeing 757 will only hold fifty or so passengers either. The website Airliners.net which gives specifications on commercial airliner types tells us that: “Typical passenger arrangements vary from 178 two class (16 first & 162 economy), or 202 (12 first & 190 economy) or 208 (12 first and 196 economy) or 214 to 239 in all economy class.”
http://www.airliners.net/aircraft-data/stats.main?id=101

So we are talking about at minimum a Boeing 757 being able to carry one hundred and seventy-eight passengers. Let’s assume Flight 93 was of the configuration to carry “only” 178 passengers. Meaning a hundred and forty-five seats were empty. I’m sorry but NO AIRLINE IN THE WORLD is going to have an airliner take off almost empty to ferry 33 ticket holding passengers from one coast of the U.S. to the other. It just doesn’t happen in the real world and here’s why: It would be catastrophically unprofitable. Remember that airline companies are a business and nothing more. They aren’t a charity or a government-sponsored free ride service. They are in business to make a profit for their shareholders and it would be absolutely LUDICROUS for them to waste enormous amounts of money on the fuel, on the salaries of their ground crew maintenance technicians and on the wear and tear on the airframe to be in the habit of flying a handful of people all over the place in a practically empty jet. Instead they would cancel the flight and have the ticket holders assigned to different flights going to the same destination so they can put full or almost full airliners into the air. If they were so stupid as to fly tiny amounts of passengers across the country they would have gone out of business decades ago.

This by no means is the only glaring hole in the official story of 9/11 but it’s one of them. I’m sorry but the official story just doesn’t pass the smell test. In fact it stinks to high heaven. If you really want to honor the victims of 9/11 then the only meaningful way to do so requires first figuring out that what really happened that awful morning is about 180 degrees away from the official myth you’ve been fed.