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. Thanks for having 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. 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 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 surrogate 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 looking

for is a chance to be wrong and offended.

And McCain got it gloriously.

And to get it in the week of July 4th is just not to be believed.

The luckiness.

I agree, except that it's so ridiculous.

After being kind of in this kind of political thing for all these years, you don't want to say that this was out of context. But if you actually saw the Bob Schiefer interview, West Clark was going on and on about how John McCain's executive service was pretty much deficient and limited and didn't qualify him. And Schifferfer is the one who actually used the phrase, but he got in a plane and got shot down.

And in response, West Clark said, getting in a plane and getting shot down is not a qualification for being president,

...