Replies to post #493186 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[OMOLIVES]

Wow....so you didn't realize that he was the one that made the now infamous political advert. That was his add and claim to fame:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a38201636/max-cleland-obituary-attack-ad-republicans/

Rove called on an ambitious conservative ad man named Rick Wilson to put together one of the most scurrilous attack ads since Lee Atwater gave Willie Horton his turn at centerstage. The ad opened with pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the point of the ad was that Max Cleland, who left half his body in a war zone, lacked the gumption to "lead" during the time of terror.

The veterans in Congress went through the rotunda dome. McCain thundered condemnation. Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican from Nebraska, threatened the Republican National Committee that he’d go to Georgia personally to campaign for Cleland if the ad didn’t come down. John Kerry of Massachusetts kept inveighing against the tactics behind the ad all the way to his own presidential nominating convention in 2004. (Kerry saw the same greasy hands behind that ad as behind the inexcusable Swift Boat attacks on his own war record.) However, by the time Kerry was nominated, Saxby Chambliss had been in the Senate for a year. The ad was the final nail in Cleland’s political coffin. The ad worked.

But the ad wasn’t through with Max Cleland. It triggered a dormant case of PTSD, and Cleland spun into a deep depression. When he published a memoir in 2009, Cleland gave a long interview to history.net:

It’s part of my own therapy, my own healing. Those of us who suffer need to talk about it and write about it. I didn’t really have a connection to the suffering of those who have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder—I call it “post-war stress”—in which you never quite get over what’s happened to you, but you move on. But after I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed. I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.

It took me right back to Vietnam, right back to the battlefield, right back to the wounding. And I had to work through all that stuff. It took me years of counseling and years on medication, and it’s been several years of just writing. I had to make sense of it all

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It had and has everything to do with Rick Wilson. That is who he and others in his profession perform. They only have loyalty to their coffers. That man, Cleland, fell apart after that. And that piece of shite' Wilson never did..and never will care. It never matters what side of a political fence they stand on....tactics for both sides are the same.