Hello and welcome to Slate's Political Gab Fest for Friday, July 4th.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

I'm here with David Plotz, Slate's editor, and Terry Samuels.

Is it okay that I called you Terry instead of Terrence, who is the deputy editor of the Root, one of our companion websites.

Welcome, Terry. Thanks for joining me. This is so terrific. Who are you? And I'm Emily

Bazelot. Same as always. I think Terry's Samuel. He's not Samuel. People always pluralize

Samuel as a name. That's really true. Did I just say that to you? You kind of get used to that.

You didn't wince a little? I did not.

That was nice of you. Okay.

It's better than calling me Samuel Terrence, which happens all the time too.

All right. All right. Fair enough. So we're going to talk this week about West Clark's remarks about John McCain's military service and patriotism as an issue in the election, the McCain campaign shakeup,

and the Chinese communist memo that was repurposed for American torture policy we learned this week.

So, David, West Clark, should he have just kept his big mouth shut?

Is it fine that he pointed out to us that McCain's combat experience isn't necessarily the same thing as executive experience?

So Clark went on, faced the nation, and said that McCain, all McCain had been doing was riding in a plane during the war, and he didn't have executive executive experience and that being shot down wasn't training for the presidency, which are all true

enough statements.

I mean, I don't think it's, even McCain himself says, you know, being a fighter pilot and

being a prison of war is not executive experience.

But it was just so strategically stupid for an Obama circuit to go on TV and make these

statements about the one kind of absolutely insurmountable thing that McCain has over Obama

and it allowed, as we've talked about before, this whole notion of taking umbrage. Like,

taking umbrage is the basic notion of this campaign. It's like all everyone, anyone is

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