Author:
I’m frankly sick and tired of hearing about what I feel is the most misquoted, out of context statement of this campaign. Well I’m glad you all saw the twelve second video clip from the DNC, or heard from one of your friends about this “outrageous” statement. However, in almost the same breath, McCain stated that the condition for keeping American troops in Iraq for any extended period of time (which the DNC video ‘conveniently’ leaves out) is if and only if “Americans are not being injured, harmed, wounded or killed”. Many of the people around campus seem to have absolutely no knowledge of this second part.
There is a very good article by The New York Times thoroughly explaining this issue. http://thecaucas.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/democrats-mccain-and-the-iraq-war/
But if you’re not much into reading, at least watch the thirty-seven second video on YouTube.
I think as college students we should be smarter than treating partisan news releases as fact and forming opinions on complex issues from word of mouth generalizations. You are free to disagree with the fact that McCain doesn’t want to withdraw troops in Iraq (based on arbitrary, politically calculated timetables), but to keep on taking McCain’s “maybe a hundred” statement grossly out of context is doing a disservice to our democratic process as a whole by making it that much harder for people to make a well informed decision on who to support this coming November.
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