oh man, this is going to be hilarious, if the youtube parody start showing up.

“Never give up, never surrender!”

And his speech? Straight out of Galaxy Quest.

OK,

#20:

Colorado Dave
March 7, 2008 at 10:40 pm

…If Clinton gets the nomination she will be in a similar predicament. She is distrusted by the Left and so will not be able to take that hard turn to the center. She will be in the same situation as McCain. She will have to get the Left to hold its collective nose to vote for her while getting those mythical swing voters in the Center.

Well, I hope not. I really want Obama to get the nomination because I think he would be a better leader of an actual democracy, as organizing collective action collaboratively rather than finagling through a top-down agenda is more his forte; this difference between him and Clinton has everything to do with why he would also be a better campaigner for November as well. And the specific tactics the Clinton people are using lately set my teeth on edge, most disturbingly the likelihood that she will attempt to trump Obama’s lead in elected, pledged delegates by trying to claim superdelegates (and the Michigan/Florida delegates) as hers by right of prior insiderness. That’s exactly the wrong sort of thing to do at this point.

Nevertheless, if she does win the nomination I for one will still be not just voting for her but campaigning for her, actively and with pride, come autumn. And I really think that Democrats in general, especially progessive ones, are much more realistic and pragmatic than their Republican counterparts. That is, as you move right from the Republican center, you get into loonier and loonier territory, with people who explicitly rely on belief in divine fiat in defiance of common sense, and/or a more and more explicit authoritarian nihilism–people like my supervisor at my old job, say, who freely admitted that the hype about invading Iraq was all a bunch of hooey, but nevertheless invading was the right thing to do because the USA should be an all-powerful hyperpower capable of defying any combination of foreigners. In short, they believe less and less in democracy and the American Way as our Capraesque mythology defines it. That is the Republican base these days, in the ideological sense, though I think we can better account for what the R machine does by assuming it is simply a front for global corporatism unbound,

But as you move leftward from the Democratic “centrists,” by and large you get people with saner and more sophisticated world-views, who fully understand that there is a difference between the world working just as you might dream it ought to and what ordinary people and vested interests will agree to do at the moment.

I have from time to time voted to the left of the Democratic offerings, but only in cases where I judged I would not tip the balance in a close race. When it is a matter of strategically heading off the worst possibilities, I have always voted for candidates who are less than ideal but better than the more reactionary alternative.

Thus I doubt Clinton has nearly as much to worry about from our Left as McCain from his Right. The US Right operates from a deep sense of entitlement and pragmatically speaking, they know though will never admit that the nuts and bolts of our society favor reaction all out of proportion to their numbers–that in the end, wealth is what we call “conservative” and our so-called democracy is more a matter of balancing dollars than people. Therefore even if their ideological extremism costs them nominal power in the nominally democratic government, they know that their special pleading will be far more effective on so-called “leftists” than even large majorities of dissidents from right-wing extremist government will be in restraining these.

The Arena has special meaning to lions when Christians are placed in it: lunchtime!

“We are Americans…..We are Americans and we’ll never surrender……they will.”

Who does he mean by “they” here?

He most definitely means Hillary and Barack. They are the anti-war candidates who want to bring our troops home instead of leaving them in Iraq for 10,000 years, as McCain has suggested.

That’s surrendering to the right. Leaving a war we never should have started is surrendering. Stopping the killing and maiming of our soldiers and a bunch of brown people who never did anything to us is surrendering.

Surrendering to whom is never answered.

…but only if you also add G. Gordon Liddy talking about threats to the purity of our precious bodily fluids…

HAAAHHHHH!!! I could really picture that…

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”

I think McCain is trying to contrast his military and POW experience with Clinton and Obama’s lack of the same. The dog-whistle is “I didn’t surrender then - I won’t surrender now.”

Of course, the T.R. quote could apply equally well to the chickenhawks in the current administration who got us into this lovely mess. And military experience isn’t everything. There’s another Illinois state legislator and single-term Congressman who did fairly well at leading the nation through a significant political and military crisis…