West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller on John McCain:
He's a fighter pilot. He flies at 35,000 feet and drops laser-guided bombs, missiles. He was long gone when they hit. What happened down there, he doesn't know.That's unkind, because that's fighting for your nation and that's honorable. But you sort of have to care what goes on in the lives of people. ... and he never gets into those subjects.
Not many people know this, but George McGovern flew bombers over Europe in WWII, and was the main subject in Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue. He often spoke of the painful memory of having to drop a bomb at noontime, which ended up hitting a farmhouse where the family was likely eating lunch. He knew it was necessary to get rid of the armed bomb, but he was always disturbed by where it hit.
Later, a member of the family called into a radio show McGovern was appearing on, to let him know that the family had heard the bomb coming and escaped the house just before it hit.
I wonder what Rockefeller would have to say about that.