“All great truths begin as blasphemies.” – George Bernard Shaw in Annajanska.

It was as big as calling Mother Teresa by her real name.

Or for a blasphemy that has teeth – it was as troubling as mentioning the name of Prophet Muhammad without enclosing in parenthesis, peace be unto him.

I do not remember anything like that being an issue when draft deferred (codename for dogging) boomer, Bill Clinton, ran against Bob Dole, a wounded war veteran. Was it because Bob Dole was not shot down in a fighter plane and held as a prisoner of war for five and half years?

Now, before you critic anything John McCain said, you have to preface your statement by saying that you honor McCain’s service to the military and you consider him a hero for the time he spent as a prisoner of war. Never mind that he now supports torturing prisoners of war.

And then you say that you respectable disagree with bla bla bla. Failure to do so, you will attract the vicious sting of guilty-ridden draft deferred boomers and their children who never served in the military. They will call for you to be fired even if you were just a regular blogger.

Well, retired Gen. Wesley Clark recently followed the gold standard in addressing John McCain. Then he veered off when he suggested that being shot down in Vietnam did not by itself qualify John McCain for president.

How dare Clark say such a dishonorable thing? Fighter pilot George W. Bush of the Texas Air National Guard would have killed for such a record in Vietnam or even across the Arizona desert.

As if that was not enough, Gen. Clark, an Obama supporter, suggested that the aviation squadron McCain was in charge of amounted to little in military command experience or/and executive experience.

“He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall,” Clark told CBS’s Bob Schieffer penultimate Sunday. “He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say: ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not — do you want to take this risk?’ ”

Now that was really below the belt. To be in charge of a squadron for a year is not as easy as producing a season of Wipedout. For sure, it is not as easy as debating on the senate floor for three decades. And by the way, knowing how to deal with diplomats is not any president’s greatest headache. There is always Ambassador John R. Bolton to handle such menial tasks. Trouble was just sleeping and Gen. Clark woke it up.

Barack Obama never served in the military. Maybe he did not even serve in the Boy’s Brigade or Boy’s Scout. So, even if John McCain simply put on a military uniform at Ellington Air Force base and took a picture near Convair F-102 fighter aircraft, just like George W. Bush did, it was a clear advantage over Obama.

Surprisingly, instead of raising the question of Clark infusing internal military politics and dichotomy into the presidential process, the question raised was if he was sent by Obama to say such horrible things about an honorable man whose service to the military we honor as well as recognizing him as a hero for his suffering as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There are already enough fireworks illuminating the political arena as it is. The army to which Gen. Clark belonged to should not add more. If it must continue to squabble with the air force for respect, it must find another way of doing so.

We recognize that in the military, just like in the wider society, there are classes and there are politics.

May the military keep their classes and politics to themselves. We, the bloody civilians, are sufficiently bemused, as it is, by our own classes and politics.