Why I won't Vote for John McCain, a Fellow POW Speaks

Roaming through the Net his morning, I came across this article by Phillip Butler, a fellow Annapolis classmate and POW held in Hanoi along with John McCain although for eight years, not five and a half.

In addition to being angry that McCain has hyped his POW experience as a qualification for being president, Butler explains with more detail that what happened to McCain happened to all POWs.

We must insist upon fact-checking by the media. I recall with great sadness an interview in August 2004 just months before the last presidential election when the city editor of the Washington Post admitted that the same newspaper the Right likes to bash for having a "liberal bias" had stopped fact-checking Bush and Cheney after September 11th so that their credibility would not be questioned. I must have heard it on NPR and I was sizzling for days, weeks, months, and now years afterward.

We must hold the media responsible to do its job. In its documentary series this summer, HBO ran a film on Helen Thomas, the veteran White House reporter, who speaks candidly about the tightrope walk of being within the inner circle and not getting lost in the aura of the president too long so that one can still ask tough questions. If you recall, with 57 years experience as the UPI White House reporter, Thomas resigned after the Rev. Moon took over this revered news agency. Here is Thomas' own website. It's tagline is "The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public."

Take a look at the documentary, if you have access to HBO: it is called "Thank You, Mr. President," a film by Rory Kennedy and first aired on August 18, 2008.