I fear and loathe John McCain as much as the next progressive, but I get a very bad feeling when I hear Thom Hartmann, dday et al. going on about the things McCain supposedly did while a POW (signing a confession, recording a propaganda film 4 days after his capture, etc.), and the things which McCain has said occurred which seem actually to be confabulations of his own wishful thinking and the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
We on the Left have been firmly against torture from day one, and regardless of McCain’s shifting positions on this issue, on this we must remain firm: torture is illegal, torture is immoral, and the fruits of torture are to be entirely disregarded, even in the case of John McCain.
The fact that McCain himself broke under torture (and it does not matter in the least how quickly he broke) should only be used to confront him on the issue of his support for torture as an information gathering technique.
And whether or not McCain actually named the starting line-up of the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Mudville Nine when questioned by the Vietnamese about his squadron is not an issue. For all we know, McCain truly may believe that he did. The memory is an elastic, fungible and most of all protective mechanism, and McCain may very well have needed to believe that to keep his ego intact during and after his time as a POW.
As for the seemingly apocryphal story of his guard drawing a cross, with sandal or stick, in the sand: I’m more agnostic on this point, as the story appeared long after McCain’s release. But here, too, his memory may be playing tricks. He may have read The Gulag Archipelago and long after remembered it as his own experience, since his experience and Solzhenitsyn’s were not too different.
I am not among those who believe John McCain is a hero for being shot down and captured in Viet Nam. Sitting out the one war he participated in does not make McCain a military expert, either. And while surviving with his mental health at least partially intact was a feat, I am wary of crowning McCain “hero” even in this regard, as many around the world have survived that and much worse and have not held themselves up as presumptive leaders as a result.
McCain has a long record of arrogance, rage and laziness both before and after his years as a POW. He is renown for his quid-pro-quo approach to donors and their political needs. There is plenty on the record to discredit John McCain.
Question McCain’s understanding of geopolitics and the economy, his many reversals and counter-reversals, his involvement with the Keating Five scandal, the current situation in Georgia and the fact that his campaign is overrun with lobbyists and conflicts of interest.
But stay away from his “service” during the Viet Nam war and his internment as a POW. Going there can only hurt Obama and our cause. We may be itching to fight back with 527s of our own, to ride the anti-McCain Swift Boat into the Oval Office, but this is the wrong candidate. At 71 and with such a pronounced physical disability, progressives will be seen as beating up on an old man if we take this route.
Stand McCain up tall as the crooked politician that he is, show him in all his true glory as the wealthy, entrenched Washington insider, and we just might win.
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