Foot in mouth disease appears to be spreading rapidly among Democrats with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) being its latest victim. While defending his endorsement of Barack Obama, Rockefeller had this to say about McCain:

In the Charleston Gazette Sunday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, who has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said that Sen. John McCain “has a temper” and, according to the story, “believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues.
“McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

As usual Ed Morrissey covered this before me and here is his take on it:

If this sounds familiar to you, it should; it’s basically what the North Vietnamese said about McCain while they tortured him in the POW camps. It indicts everyone in the Air Force and the Navy whose job it is to fire laser-guided missiles now in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Rockefeller also sounds an awful lot like Barack Obama, who claimed that the entire strategy in Afghanistan consisted of “just air raiding villages and killing civilians”.

Besides, fighter pilots don’t drop a lot of bombs; they protect bombers. They generally engage other aircraft and most of their targets are air-to-air.

Oh, and one more note to Rockefeller: Laser-guided missiles and bombs actually reduce collateral civilian casualties. Just thought you should know.

Michael Goldfarb slams Rockefeller and exposes the Senators ignorance on the subject:

Rockefeller, who is one year younger than McCain, probably wouldn’t know this since he was enjoying the privileges of his station when McCain was bombing Vietnamese with abandon, but the laser-guided munition did not come into service until after McCain became a prisoner of war.

And of course, McCain was engaged in low-level attack on a heavily defended power plant in Hanoi when he was shot down. Rather than dropping bombs from the relative safety of 35,000 feet, McCain and his comrades were willing to put their lives at great risk in order to hit specific, high-value targets without the assistance of guided munitions. Though I’m sure Rockefeller, with his billion dollar trust fund, is infinitely more sensitive to the “human issues” of the average American than John McCain.

I am anxious to see if Obama will reply to this comment by Rockefeller as quickly as he replied to the non-racist statement made by one of his delegates.

Update: Rockefeller was ‘forced’ to apologize to McCain:

U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) was forced to apologize Tuesday to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain for comments he made about McCain’s military service.

“I have profound respect and appreciate his dedication to our country, and I regret my very poor choice of words,” Rockefeller said in a prepared statement.

“I have a deep respect for John McCain’s honorable and noble service to our country,” Rockefeller said in the statement. “I made an inaccurate and wrong analogy and I have extended by sincere apology to him.”

Later, Obama’s office issued a statement saying Obama “does not agree with what Senator Rockefeller said.”

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Barack Obama, Dumb Dems, Election 2008, Politics