Bill Clinton may be the master of the underhanded political slap – but can’t he at least refrain from smear ing an entire class of his country’s war heroes in the process?
Including, inferentially, de facto Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
Sadly, self-restraint is not the thing that Bill Clinton does best; it would require just a bit too much honor from America’s reigning embarrassment-in-chief.
“It’s like if you know anyone who’s ever a POW for any length of time,” the former president opined in Aspen, Colo., over the weekend, “you will see that [they] go along for months or even years and then something will happen that will trigger all those bad dreams.”
Better keep an eye on those former prisoners-of-war, in other words – you never know when they might snap.
Maybe at 3 a.m., don’t you know.
It’s a breathtakingly ignorant stereotype, of course – but none too surprising from a man whose chief experience of armed combat consisted of avoiding it.
Or, come to think of it, from a politician whose party’s nominee for president happens to be facing just such a war hero in November.
Not that Clinton would ever come out and attack McCain directly over his five-year Vietnam captivity. The ex- president’s remark came instead – and somewhat awkwardly – in the middle of effusive praise for former South African President Nelson Mandela.
But Clinton, veteran political animal that he is, knows precisely how to plant a seed.
It’s disgraceful – and doubly unfair to the men of Clinton’s generation (and, potentially, those of the present one) who languished for years in captivity.
Clinton joked in the same speech that, as someone who’s “not running for anything,” he can “pretty well” say whatever he wants.
If that’s how he chooses to present himself, so be it.
But he’d do a big favor to the dignity of the office he held if, just once, he held his tongue in such circumstances.
Fat chance of that, though.