smorg

A Salon.com article has the following to say about John McCain:

During McCain’s first White House run, his unsuccessful battle with George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999 and 2000, he faced a whispering campaign from rivals that suggested his Vietnam ordeal had permanently damaged his psyche — specifically, that his famed outbursts of temper might be a sign of something serious, like post-traumatic stress disorder.

It is well documented that the sort of treatment McCain endured can harm the mind. A 1989 study in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, one of many studies on the subject, showed that a third of American World War II prisoners of war met diagnostic criteria for PTSD fully 40 years after their release.

In 1999, McCain responded to the questions about his mental health by allowing selected reporters to peruse 1,500 pages of his health records dating back to his release from Hanoi in 1973. Reporters were not permitted to photocopy any of the documents. The reporters who looked at the records did not describe any mention of a PTSD diagnosis. However, they failed to note that it would have been impossible for McCain to receive such a diagnosis — since the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” was not in use until seven years after McCain’s release from captivity. The term first appeared in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.

I really hope that this campaign doesn’t turn to stuff like this. McCain is a veteran who has gone through a lot of shit in his life - yes, he’s short tempered; no, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and no, he is not Presidential material.

But this is a man who has served the US for most of his life and has the physical, and yes, mental scars to prove it. That’ doesn’t give anyone the right to impugn his reputation and years of service by implying he is mentally ill and thus unfit to serve further. I think it’s fair to say that anyone who has seen battle has at least low-level PTSD - hell, even people in the vicinity of the WTC and Pentagon have been diagnosed. That doesn’t mean that they are incapable of making decisions.

The article above (not an official Obama or Democratic stance by the way) is akin to someone suggesting that Obama shouldn’t be President because growing up on a farm in Kenya has damaged his psyche…it’s simply bullshit.

Beat him with the issues, not by innuendo.