Senator McCain, You are dismissed

by YankeeJim | December 2, 2010 at 03:51 pm

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What do two old war heroes have in common, i.e., Charlie Rangel and John McCain? They can’t shut up. They are stuck.

The nation has moved on and they are still yapping: one begs for forgiveness, the other begs for stupidity. The military preparatory command is “Shut.” The command of execution is “Up.” As in Shut Up.

“'Don't ask, don't tell' dismissed by McCain

By Ed O'Keefe

Updated and corrected 2:57 p.m. ET

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading Republican critic of ending the "don't ask, don't tell" law, dismissed a new Pentagon report on the issue Thursday and said Congress should not vote to change military personnel policy during a time of war.

"At this time, we should be inherently cautious about making any changes that would affect our military, and what changes we do make should be the product of careful and deliberate consideration," McCain said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

The panel heard from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and the co-authors of the report released Tuesday, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh C. Johnson and Army Gen. Carter F. Ham.

Concerns expressed by troops in the report about ending the ban on gays in the military "do not present an insurmountable barrier" to successfully ending the law, Gates said.

Despite those assurances, McCain said more time is needed to consider whether the military should change the law. The Pentagon studied the issue for 10 months, but "The members of this committee received it 36 hours ago, and my staff and I are still going through it and analyzing it carefully," McCain said.

He once again voiced his disagreement with the scope of the report, saying it failed to study whether the law should be repealed. "Unfortunately, that key issue was not the focus of this study," he said. Further, he worried that a study sent to troops last summer only accounts for 6 percent of the total armed forces.”