Jack & Jill Politics

h/t TPM

Hot damn I knew it. I knew these servicemen and women who volunteered for the military, staying deployed far longer than promised and generally making due with a non-existent war strategy absolutely hated this country. Nothing says “I don’t put country first” like sucking it up and fighting in an undefined war while the civilian population goes on racking up debt and gorging on the natural resource you and your buddies are killing and dying for.

A new study shows John McCain, Mr. Honor and War and Blood, is getting his ass handed to him by the very military personnel he is assumed to represent.

According to the non-partisan Center For Responsive Politics

Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain’s haul.

Case closed. It’s as if the military is going out of its way to tell McCain it doesn’t want him as commander in chief. That’s gotta hurt the war hero’s little feelings pretty badly.

More

Individuals in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps have all leaned Republican this cycle, but the only branch in which that ideology has carried over to the presidential race is the Marine Corps, where McCain leads Obama by about $4,000. In each of the other branches — including the Navy, in which McCain served when he was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War — Obama leads by significant margins.

“That’s shocking. The academic debate is between some who say that junior enlisted ranks lean slightly Republican and some who say it’s about equal, but no one would point to six-to-one” in Democrats’ favor, said Aaron Belkin, a professor of political science at the University of California who studies the military. “That represents a tremendous shift from 2000, when the military vote almost certainly was decisive in Florida and elsewhere, and leaned heavily towards the Republicans.”

I repeat: Obama leads McCain among the Navy. How can you lead the entire nation, when the entire premise of your candidacy is undermined by the fact that your own seamen have rejected you?

Pimp this story hard.