And the Winner of the Democratic Primary is... Mark Penn

Amid all the hilarity surrounding Hillary Clinton's embroidered account of what happened at the Tuzla airport, I think there is something important being overlooked here.

For whatever inscrutable reason, Senator Clinton has put forth this fish tale as a part of her foreign policy experience. The only reason any of us have heard this story at all is that this, to her, is proof that she "passes the Commander in Chief threshold."

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

Hillary Clinton
Remarks at George Washington University
March 17, 2008

Nevermind that it's a complete fabrication, let's just give her the benefit of the doubt and pretend for a moment that it actually happened the way she says it did.

Are you with me? Okay...

Has she completely forgotten that she's running against this guy?

John McCain's capture and imprisonment began on October 26, 1967. He was flying his twenty-third bombing mission over North Vietnam, when his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a Soviet-made SA-2 anti-aircraft missile over Hanoi. McCain fractured both arms and a leg, and then nearly drowned when he parachuted into Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi. After he regained consciousness, a mob gathered around, spat on him, kicked him, and stripped him of his clothes. Others crushed his shoulder with the butt of a rifle and bayoneted him in his left foot and abdominal area; he was then transported to Hanoi's main Hoa Loa Prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by American POWs.

Although McCain was badly wounded, his captors refused to give him medical care unless he gave them military information, beating and interrogating him. Only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a top admiral did they give him medical care and announced his capture. His status as a POW made the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

McCain spent six weeks in the Hoa Loa hospital, receiving marginal care. Now having lost 50 pounds, in a chest cast, and with his hair turned white, McCain was sent to a different camp on the outskirts of Hanoi in December 1967, into a cell with two other Americans who did not expect him to live a week; they nursed McCain and kept him alive. In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he would remain for two years.

In August of 1968, a program of severe torture methods began on McCain, using rope bindings into painful positions, and beatings every two hours, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery. McCain made an anti-American propaganda "confession" that said he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate". He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable, but as he would later write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine." His injuries left him permanently incapable of raising his arms above his head. He subsequently received two to three beatings per week because of his continued refusal to sign additional statements. Other American POWs were similarly tortured and maltreated in order to extract "confessions", with many enduring even worse treatment than McCain.

There is no single human being in the United States Senate, perhaps not even in the whole Congress, who can top that one. That's no fish tale, that really happened. No matter who you like in the election you have to concede that this is a remarkable story, one we are guaranteed to hear recited over and over between now and November.

How is it even possible that Hillary Clinton, who is a political animal as thoroughbred as anyone has ever seen, never even thought of that? If we are to give her the benefit of the doubt yet again, then the nicest thing you can say about this is that it was a lack of foresight and judgment: which just happen to be the two personal attributes Barack Obama is running on himself!

Are we supposed to believe that among Carville, Wolfson, McAuliffe, and Penn, this never occurred to any of them? The entire grand theme of Hillary's campaign is her questionable "experience," but she can't credibly hold up her time as First Lady against John McCain's unique experience as a prisoner of war. It just looks ridiculous.

All of these lines of inquiry lead back to one central interrogative I have regarding Hillary Clinton's campaign for president: What the fuck? No, seriously. What the fuck?

The Clinton campaign is presumably going to run against a former POW who was long ago crowned a "straight talker" by the media by littering the campaign trail with bald-faced lies about something that really wasn't all that impressive to begin with. People within her own campaign give her no more than a ten percent chance of winning. And say what you will about Hillary Clinton, there's really no evidence to support the idea that she personally wants McCain to win.

The only credible conclusion I can come to is that Mark Penn, whose lobbying firm is run by one of McCain's top advisors, is simply teeing up Obama for a general election sweep. Hillary has a fifth column within her own campaign, and she stubbornly refuses to fire that motherfucker in spite of the fact that, in the words of Mark Halperin, "there’s hardly anyone [on Clinton's staff] who, given half a chance, wouldn’t slit Mark Penn’s throat."

In other words, he's not Hillary's campaign surrogate, she's his.