Ari Berman: The McCain campaign is playing fast and loose with the truth.

[babylonsister]

:grr:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/339869

McCain Misleads on Obama Troop Visit
posted by Ari Berman on 07/28/2008 @ 11:44am

snip//

Essentially, the Bush Administration intervened to block Obama's planned visit and now the McCain campaign is criticizing Obama for it. Isn't that ironic?

McCain's new ad claims that "McCain is always there for our troops." Except when he's not. McCain recently opposed (and then skipped the vote on) a 21st century GI Bill for our men and women in uniform. It wasn't an isolated incident.

"{McCain} has demonstrated a tendency to work against veterans' interests, voting time after time against funding and in favor of privatizing services--in other words, of rolling back the VA's improvements by supporting some of the same policies that wrecked Walter Reed," Brian Beutler wrote in The Nation in June. As Beutler notes:

During a March 2005 Senate budget debate, McCain voted to kill an amendment that would have "increase veterans medical care by $2.8 billion in 2006." That amendment lacked an assured funding stream, but lest one mistake this incident for a maverick's stance against budget-busting, there's more. Just a year later McCain voted against an amendment that would have "increase{d} Veterans medical services funding by $1.5 billion in FY 2007 to be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.

McCain has displayed courage under fire, but he's no longer the champion for the troops he claims to be.