“Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal,” the essay began. “Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.”

The men did not write in a vacuum, or from the comfort of a Washington think tank. As they were preparing their essay, one of them, Staff Sgt. Jeremy A. Murphy, an Army Ranger, was shot in the head. He survived. Less than a month later, two others, Sgt. Omar Mora and Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, died in a vehicle rollover in western Baghdad. Still in their 20s, each left behind a wife and a young daughter.

It is, of course, impossible to note in a single article the stories of each of the 892 American men and women who died so far this year serving in Iraq, or of the 3,895 who have died since the war’s inception or the 28,661 who have been wounded. But in the story of Mora and Gray, we are given a clear glimpse of what our soldiers died for. They did not just die for the mission, as prescribed to them by their superiors. “We need not talk about our morale,” they wrote in the Times. “As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.”

They died in service to a country where even the soldier in the field has the right to question the judgment of the commander in chief. They died in service to the idea that political and military leaders must be held to account for their failures and challenged on their facts. A month after their article ran in the Times, the soldiers words echoed through the halls of Congress, when the war’s Gen. David Petraeus and its chief diplomat, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, came to testify. “Are we going to dismiss those seven NCOs? Are they ignorant?” asked Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who opposes continuing the war, at one hearing. “They laid out a pretty different scenario, General, Ambassador, from what you’re laying out today.”

The general and the ambassador did not directly respond. They showed charts and cited statistics that gave reason for optimism. Indeed, the numbers were following a positive trend from August. The monthly toll of American fatalities, which had gone from 84 in August to 65 in September, continued to drop, to 37 in November. The number of bombings and incidents involving improvised explosive devices also declined. But the concerns of Mora, Gray and their friends never focused on these sorts of statistics. “Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere,” the men wrote.

The political improvements that the so-called surge was meant to deliver have not materialized. The Iraqi police and army remain corrupt. The religious and ethnic factions remain deeply hostile to one another. Living conditions for the Iraqi populace remain abysmal. According to a recent report, Baghdad still gets less than half as many hours of electricity, four years after the invasion, than it did before the war.

“In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect,” the men wrote. “They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal. Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit.”

In Washington, these words were churned through the political grinder. Advocates for a prompt withdrawal waved them as evidence that the Bush policy was failing and the troops must come home. Even the New York Times’ editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, trumpeted the article as evidence of the military strategists’ failure. “Not every soldier in Iraq buys this Potemkin war they are selling,” he told Editor and Publisher.

After his death, Mora’s stepfather, Robert Capetillo, said that Mora had told his family before his death that the article was misinterpreted as a call for withdrawal, when it was in fact a call for a new strategy. The 28-year-old, a child of Ecuador who had grown up in Texas City, Texas, was still very much committed to continuing his service, with dreams of joining the Army Special Forces. “My son gave his life for his country because he loves his country, and because this country raised him like he was its own,” his mother, Olga, told the newspaper in Galveston. Mora finally earned his citizenship papers just a few weeks before he died. In a similar way, Gray’s parents told their local press of a boy who always wanted to be a soldier. He would dress up in his grandpa’s Army uniform and decided at age 5 that he wanted one day to be a Ranger in the 82nd Airborne. He left behind a 5-month-old daughter. He had spent only 14 days at her side.

Both men represented the best of America’s democratic tradition, where even in wartime, enlisted soldiers have a right to their opinions. If there is a lesson in their memory, it may be that true patriots respectfully speak up when they see something going wrong. It cannot be unpatriotic to criticize the military. It shows no flagging of spirit to point to a new direction. And for this reason Omar Mora and Yance T. Gray are Salon’s People of the Year.

So the question must be raised: What exactly is Meghan McCain, the 23-year old daughter of Republican candidate John McCain, thinking as she makes her way through the backstage passageways at her father’s MTV/MySpace forum? Dressed to impress, in black knee-high boots, she moves on a mission, sometimes a Diet Coke in hand, a mini-entourage of friends swirling around: a photographer, a videographer, and a close pal, La-Toria Haven, who happens to be wearing a vintage campaign button from the 1972 McGovern campaign, with the anti-war message “Come Home America.” Collectively, they are the team that produces McCainBlogette.com, one daughter’s experiment in citizen journalism, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a young person’s life on the campaign trail.

In the brutal, dehumanizing, free-fire-zone of presidential politics, this is exactly the kind of thing that is never allowed: A candidate’s daughter doing her own thing. It’s acceptable if Sarah Huckabee, the 25-year-old daughter of the Iowa frontrunner, works herself to the bone as her father’s field director. It makes sense when Chelsea, 27, hits the trail to stand behind mom Hillary in an attempt to counteract the Oprah effect. Even Cate Edwards, 25, can get away with helping dad John pack supplies at a food pantry on the eve of Thanksgiving. But how does Meghan McCain fit in? One recent blog entry praised songs by Tupac Shakur, the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and something called “Sex Bomb” by the German orchestra leader Max Raabe.

If she wants to blog according to the rules, she should be doing what the Romney sons do in their “Five Brothers Blog,” i.e., unending chirpy cheerleading. Writes oldest son Tagg in one entry, “Now is the time for all of our readers to step up to the plate and help us win the nomination.” Go Team Romney! Meghan should be acting as a campaign prop, delivering the message of the day — No Surrender! Straight Talk! The Surge Works! — but instead she is working the room with a crew that sports a tongue stud and an oversized anti-war campaign pin from 1972.

In other words, she tries to do what she wants, which means, in her case, entries about having fun on the campaign trail, as the official campaign staff nervously eyes her from a distance. “I thought there are probably a lot of people out there who have no idea what a campaign is like, what it looks like, what a campaign feels like,” she says of the inspiration for her blog, which is funded and operated independent from the campaign. “I wanted to show my friends and people that so much about politics and so much happens behind the scenes.”

And that is what you get on McCain Bloggette — ephemera, not politics or policy. The girls post photos of “Dad,” the candidate, having his makeup done in the pre-debate green room. Then there are shots of Meghan and her friend Haven, the vintage pin collector, sunning on the airport runway in South Carolina, or belting karaoke with campaign staff in Dubuque. From the blog: “[S]ome friends from the campaign invited us to join them at a karaoke bar down the street and we decided to go, clad in our pajamas. In true karaoke fashion, I proceeded to butcher ‘New York, New York’ and La-Toria and Heather gave their best attempt at ‘Celebrate.’”

In one post, Meghan displays a star tattoo on her right foot. In another, she notes that her boots were made by Giuseppe Zanotti, a lapsed disc jockey turned shoe designer from San Mauro Pascoli, Italy. It is, in other words, the blog of a 23-year-old devoted to Dad who happens to be on the campaign trail — not the blog of a candidate’s daughter who has joined the campaign. “My parents didn’t make me scared of the world. I’m not scared,” Meghan explains. “I mean people are going to judge you anyway, so I would rather just let people judge me on my own terms.”

In exchange for taking this treacherous path, Meghan and the girls have been duly punished online. To blog as a woman is hard enough. To blog as a blonde woman in politics who boasts about her own fashion sense is harder. Comparisons to Paris Hilton and other professional ditzes are emailed with some frequency. When the blog debuted, the snide Washington gossip site Wonkette headlined its post, “Dept. of Your Blog Sucks.” The snarky “ladyblog” Jezebel mock-gushed, “Boy is she blonde!” Another blog editorialized, “It reads like bad Vogue, or Chicken Soup for the Campaign Daughter’s Soul.”

But then Meghan has been around this block before, and she chooses to ignore the bad vibes. “I can’t read things that are mean to me or mean to my family,” she says. Even before puberty, she was thrust in front of a camera at the 1996 Republican National Convention, in an American flag print outfit that she disapproves of to this day. In 2000, when her father ran an insurgent Republican primary campaign, the prospect of her having a hypothetical abortion became the subject of national political chatter. “It’s the really sick part of politics,” Meghan explains. “Everybody Googles everybody when they go on a date with them. I got set up with a guy a few years ago. He was like, ‘Is it really true that people asked about your hypothetical abortion?’ I was like, this is a fun date.”

The idea for the blog began last summer, after Meghan graduated Columbia with a degree in Art History and internships at Newsweek and “Saturday Night Live” under her belt. Her younger brother Jimmy, 19, had enlisted in the Marine Corps and was preparing to ship overseas. Her brother Jack, 21, was about to enter his junior year at the Naval Academy, and her little sister Bridget, 16, was still in high school in Arizona. Her three older siblings, from her father’s first marriage, all had school, jobs and family to occupy them. She alone wanted to find a way to spend her time on her father’s campaign, but she wanted to do it on her own terms.

“I knew I wanted to help out, but I just didn’t know what to do,” she remembers. So, with Haven, she started reading old campaign books. She read the fictional “Primary Colors,” the non-fiction but drug-enhanced “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.” They watched “Journeys With George,” Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary of the 2000 Bush campaign. By September, the idea of a blog had started to congeal. “She did not want it to be an extension of the campaign,” remembers Cindy McCain, the candidate’s wife and Meghan’s mother. But that was alright. “The only message that I have ever encouraged any of my children to listen to and live by is just be yourself,” says Cindy. “John’s maverick attitude is very much what Meghan is about also.”

And so the project was green-lighted, and the traveling McCain campaign staff was told to incorporate a traveling troupe of as many as four young women on the road, with near-total access to the candidate. Editing for the site is done remotely, by a former McCain staffer who does not currently work on the campaign. But when Meghan speaks to the press, as in this article, a campaign minder tags along.

“Very heavy,” deadpans father McCain, 71, when asked what he thinks of the blog. He then shoots a knowing look to his spokeswoman. “Some of it is hard for me to understand. A lot of heavy issues, you know.” But does he approve of his daughter showing off her tattoo and boasting about her taste for Tom Waits? “She’s having fun,” he continues. “I want her to enjoy the campaign. It’s once in a lifetime. And then I want her to get a job.”

Cindy McCain said she wanted to make sure that Meghan was ready for the flak that might come. “The only thing that was ever discussed with Meghan,” she says, “was making sure that she understood by upping her public profile she was upping herself as a target.”

Back at the MTV forum, she does not seem to be worrying about such things. Just a few days earlier, she had done a standup interview with Sway, a dreadlocked MTV news correspondent, in which she talked about how much Red Bull she drank. “It can get really tense. It’s so serious all the time. The sky is always falling,” she said about the professional reporters and staffers on the campaign. Now backstage, she races around, all-access pass dangling, chatting up the crowd and setting up shots with her camera ladies. MTV correspondent Gideon Yago stops to chat with her. John Norris, MTV’s ageless newsman in tight jeans and blond curls, does a standup with her. Meghan McCain is having fun, with just weeks to go before Iowa and New Hampshire. She is not sure if it will help her father win the election.

“One thing I was trying to do is show that I have my own personality, and I am real. And I think people respond to authenticity,” she says, reciting the McCain family motto. “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘I love your blog.’ So I don’t know if it is influencing voters, but it is influencing people.”

This sort of sentiment is heresy in a multimillion dollar presidential campaign. Voters, in the end, are the only thing that matters. But then Meghan is not the candidate. She is just the candidate’s daughter, and she is trying to figure out for herself what that means.

Then today, there comes another press release from the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. “Real Minutemen Do Not Endorse Huckabee,” it blared. It continued, with a run-on sentence:

Jim Gilchrist here speaks only for Jim Gilchrist, he does not speak for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, nor is he nationally representative of most patriots in the “Minuteman movement” – who under no circumstances could ignore the failed record nor endorse the duplicitous “plan” recently rolled out by candidate Mike Huckabee.

There are two things going on here. First, the so-called Minuteman movement is deeply fractured. A retired Marine and accountant, Gilchrist became a star in 2005, when he used the Internet and talk radio to mobilize hundreds of people for symbolic month of border watching. He accomplished this feat by joining forces with Chris Simcox, a former school teacher, who already had a band of people walking the border as volunteers. The two men never got along too well, a fact that was much in evidence during the initial Minuteman operation, which I covered. Then the relationship soured even further, and Gilchrist eventually went to war with the “Minuteman Project” board amid allegations of financial mismanagement. Simcox signed the Wednesday press release denouncing the Gilchrist endorsement.

The second, more substantive issue is that Huckabee has not been much of an immigration hardliner, at least until recently. His new nine-point policy, however, includes the remarkable, if somewhat baffling, plan to require illegal immigrants to “register” with the federal government in a 120 day window. If they register, they will be deported and asked to apply for citizenship. If they do not register and allow themselves to be deported, they will be “caught” and then barred from reentry for 10 years. This is a long way from Huckabee’s role as an Arkansas governor who fought to give tuition benefits to the children of illegal immigrants.

But there is a bad moon rising. For several weeks now, David Yepsen, the reigning dean of the Iowa political press, has been writing columns that portend evil on the horizon. At the end of November, he wrote a column titled “The Illinois Caucus,” which led with these ominous words:

Barack Obama’s campaign is telling Iowa college students they can caucus for him even if they aren’t from Iowa. His campaign offers that advice in a brochure being distributed on college campuses in the state. A spokesman said it’s legal and that 50,000 of the fliers are being distributed. The brochure says: “If you are not from Iowa, you can come back for the Iowa caucus and caucus in your college neighborhood.”

Sounds scary and outrageous, right? It’s not. Iowa law is very clear. Out-of-state students attending Iowa schools are allowed to caucus, as long as they don’t also vote or caucus in their home state. Never mind what the “spokesman said.” But this fact did not assuage Yepsen. He argues that the law is not the point. “These are the Iowa caucuses,” he continues. “Asking people who are ‘not from Iowa’ to participate in them changes the nature of the event.” This week, he wrote another ominous column. To wit:

Maybe we should call these the Illinois caucuses. Officials and campaigners in both parties are worried that zealous out-of-state staffers and non-Iowa supporters of candidates may try to vote in the caucuses, thereby skewing the results.

His new column casually rolls together several distinct issues. First, there is a legitimate concern that nonstudent residents from Nebraska or Illinois could come and try to register for the Iowa caucuses, which would be illegal. (To participate in the Democratic caucus people must register as Democrats, legally stating that they live in the state, though there is no requirement to show identification.) Second, there is a debate over whether the out-of-state staffers who have been working on campaigns in Iowa should be counted as residents for the purposes of the caucus, which is more of a gray area, especially if a staffer is sleeping on someone’s couch for a few days. Then Yepsen again raises the specter of the totally legal out-of-state Iowa college student. “On the Democratic side, Barack Obama’s campaign is telling Iowa college students they can caucus for him even if they aren’t from Iowa,” Yepsen writes.

From a distance, this is totally bizarre. He singles out Obama, who polls show has the most to gain from the student vote, even though most of the Democratic candidates are telling all Iowa college students to vote legally. Hillary Clinton has apparently tried to jump on the Yepsen bandwagon, insinuating malicious intent. “This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here,” she said at a recent appearance in Clear Lake. At the same time, of course, the Clinton campaign is continuing its effort to turn out its own out-of-state Iowa student supporters. “Hillary wants every student who lives in Iowa and wants to caucus in Iowa and is eligible to caucus in Iowa to do so,” said her communications director, Howard Wolfson, in a recent statement.

As the top political columnist in the state, Yepsen clearly sees his role as a protector of the sanctity of the caucus process, which is relatively unguarded with few protections against organized fraud. But it becomes an issue of national concern when a major newspaper writer, or a presidential candidate, appears to be condemning efforts to get students to exercise their legal rights. The Iowa Public Interest Research Group, which works to motivate college students to vote, put out a statement Tuesday expressing justifiable outrage at the whole tenor of the discussion, especially now that it has been echoed by a candidate. “We’re shocked that any national figure would advocate for youth disenfranchisement,” the statement read. “This goes against the very grain of our democracy and the core values of our nation.”

If any candidate’s Iowa supporters bring in illegal, non-Iowans to the caucus, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But in the meantime, this whole controversy should serve as further motivation for Iowa’s out-of-state students to come back early from Christmas vacation to caucus, regardless of whom they support. These students have the legal right to express their opinion. Yepsen and others can argue that the law needs to be changed, but those arguments should not keep anyone from exercising the fundamental duty of all American citizens.

How does he pull this off? Mostly with sympathetic, inclusive rhetoric. At the Values Voter debate in September, for example, Huckabee took time in an answer about gay marriage to express his tolerance for gay people. “I want us to be very careful that we don’t come across as having some animosity or hatred toward people, even [those] whose lifestyles are inexplicable to us,” he said.

But there are now sufficient reasons to question whether Huckabee meets his own benchmarks of tolerance when it comes to gay and lesbian issues. Over the weekend, the Associated Press disclosed a questionnaire Huckabee had filled out as part of a failed 1992 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Here’s what he had to say then about the subjects of gay rights and the AIDS epidemic:

If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague … It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.

He also said that AIDS was getting too much federal funding, compared with other diseases that affect more people.

In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified. An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor (,) Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research.

Finally, he weighed in on homosexuality itself.

I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.

These are not the words of a politician concerned about showing “animosity or hatred” toward gay people. In fact, Huckabee appears to be deep in the trenches of social warfare, identifying AIDS with a sinful, Hollywood-based, politically correct social movement that is endangering society both spiritually and medically. He was also wrong on the facts. At the time he filled out this questionnaire, it was well known that AIDS was not spread with the sort of casual contact that would have justified a quarantine. In 1986, the U.S. surgeon general had released his “Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” which stated this fact clearly. “AIDS is not spread by common everyday contact,” the report reads. “We would know by now if AIDS were passed by casual, non-sexual contact.”

In Huckabee’s defense, he was not the only one who did not know the facts about AIDS in 1992. And his comments might also be explainable if Huckabee had since realized, and apologized for, his mistakes. But that is not what he has done. Over the weekend, Huckabee released a statement defending his ignorance at the time. Perhaps the most important part of the statement, as Marc Ambinder points out, is that it contains no repudiation of his anti-gay statements. Instead, he focuses on the confusion that remained in 1992 about the threat of AIDS, a confusion harbored mainly by those who had failed to educate themselves about the science. “At the time, there was widespread concern over modes of transmission and the possibility of epidemic,” Huckabee says in the statement. “In the absence of conclusive data, my focus was on efforts to limit the exposure of the virus.”

Set aside the fact that this is a distortion of history. The statement squarely calls into question Huckabee’s kinder, gentler rhetoric. On Fox News Sunday, he explained his AIDS comments this way: “I’m going to simply say that that was exactly what I said. I don’t run from it, don’t recant from it. Would I say it a little differently today? Sure, in light of 15 years of additional knowledge and understanding, I would.”

Back in September, I wrote a “Gay voters guide to the GOP,” a fun look at how each of the presidential candidates views gay issues. I placed Huckabee as the most gay-friendly of the marriage hard-liners, in part because of the tone of his rhetoric. In light of this weekend’s statement, however, it is clear that Huckabee does not deserve that place. Sympathetic rhetoric only goes so far. Candidates must be judged on how they perform when they are backed into a political corner.