John Poor of BMI was there when Beers spoke and was kind enough to forward the audio. I wanted to reserve judgment until we had a fuller quote or a transcript; feel free now to judge away. As expected, his point is mainly a rehash of that obnoxious Times piece arguing, per McCain’s anti-Iraq vet colleagues in the senate, that he doesn’t grasp how difficult war is because he spent the Vietnam years merely being tortured instead of in combat. Beers (himself a former Marine and Vietnam vet) actually takes it a step further: Because McCain never got to taste the excitement of the “turmoil” here at home in the late 60s, that too limits his policy vision. Why and how are left unsaid, but do note the tacit contradiction between him and Wes Clark. Clark’s point is that soldiering, at least at the lower ranks, doesn’t qualify as “executive experience.” Fair enough — except that Beers seems to think that it does, at least as far as national security is concerned, and even seems to believe that not soldiering is a credential so long as you were home protesting at the time. By those lights, about the only experience that could have left you sufficiently cloistered to “sadly limit” your grasp of defense is … being a POW for five years. Funny how that works out. Just like it’s funny how prominent Democrats keep challenging McCain’s hawkishness with these thumbnail psychoanalyses of his wartime ordeal and how it’s supposedly left him with some form of diminished capacity. I wonder what the subtext of that is.
Note that the voice heard in the first half of the clip belongs to a questioner. Beers doesn’t start speaking until around 1:30.
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