Courage and sacrifice

Kathleen Parker:

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As the news cycle churns, Clark's comment was yesterday's chum. It was in poor taste, yes, but it wasn't the first time he had expressed similar thoughts. National Review's Byron York blogged in March that Clark viewed McCain's combat experience as inferior to Hillary Clinton's qualifications for office.

"If you look at what Hillary Clinton has done during her time as the first lady of the United States, her travel to 80 countries, her representing the U.S. abroad, plus her years in the Senate, I think she's the most experienced and capable person in the race," York quotes Clark as saying.

Ahem. Well. So much for that. Now that Clark is a military adviser to Obama, he apparently is still skeptical about McCain's qualifications.

Let's concede that surviving torture doesn't necessarily endow one with presidential mettle. And, fine, being shot down doesn't qualify one to direct the executive branch.

But Clark misses the point of McCain's story.

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

It may not take much effort to get shot down, 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 to place concern for others above one's own interest.

Surely self-sacrifice, courage and loyalty figure somewhere in the calculus for selecting a president.

We can make no similar analysis of Obama, since he hasn't fought in any wars in his lifetime. But we have been given a glimpse at how Obama responds to external pressures and where he draws the line on loyalty and self-sacrifice. When it comes to family and friends, it seems Obama is first a survivalist.

A few months ago, when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright first came to national attention, Obama was nearly demure when he said: "I can no more disown (Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother."

He may not have disowned his white grandmother, but Obama didn't exactly paint a sympathetic -- or loving -- portrait of her either. He essentially threw her under the bus, saying that she had made racist remarks while he was growing up, a statement that served only to highlight Obama's own remarkable transcendence.

After several weeks of balancing his professed love for Wright with the controversial statements of his chosen father figure and spiritual mentor, Obama eventually left his church of 20 years. But why then, after all those years, did Obama finally find the door?

What changed was the degree of his self-interest. As long as Wright was helping Obama burnish his bona fides within the African-American community, it didn't matter that the minister's rhetorical flights of fancy bordered on paranoid, racist delusion. Only when Wright became a potential obstacle to Obama's ambition -- by saying that Obama was simply behaving as a politician -- did Obama show Wright the underside of that very busy bus.

Clark is right that getting shot down doesn't qualify one to be commander in chief. But it is relevant to wonder with whom one would rather share a foxhole.

Obama certainly has shown no political courage. He can cite no example of when he has taken a position that is unpopular with his party on any issue of significance. As was pointed out in a post yesterday, when the votes were cast condemning the MoveOn slander of Gen. Petraeus Obama was a no show.

He waited until he had the nomination wrapped up to condemn MoveOn when their alternatives had been eliminated. He has never demonstrated the physical courage of diving an attack aircraft into the teeth of enemy anti aircraft fire or even doing a carrier landing. It takes both skill and courage to do that.

The Democrats will continue to make snide remarks about McCain's service because they know it is one of his strengths. Democrats will do anything to gain power and this is just one of those things they will do. It does not take courage or sacrifice to do it.