The POW Dodge

John McCain maintains that he doesn't exploit his captivity in Vietnam for his campaign, but in reality he can barely talk about anything else. That's fine, but McCain's service should be the start of a conversation -- not the end of one

Paul Waldman | May 27, 2008


When John Kerry made his Vietnam heroism a centerpiece of his 2004 presidential campaign, his colleague John McCain thought it unwise. "I said, ‘Look, you shouldn't talk about Vietnam because everybody else will. Let everybody else do it,'" McCain told the Washington Post. "In my <2000> campaign, as you know, I didn't talk about it because I didn't need to."

McCain was half right. It's true that he didn't need to; in that campaign, as in this one, reporters seldom forgot to mention that McCain was a POW in Vietnam. In fact, according to Lexis-Nexis, in the first three months of 2008 over a thousand newspaper articles mentioned that McCain was a prisoner of war. Journalists often use "former POW" in their stories as an identifier on par with "Arizona senator" or "Republican" -- even when his years in Hanoi have nothing to do with the issue or event being discussed. But when McCain asserted that he "didn't talk about it," he was being either strikingly dishonest or simply delusional. The truth is that he brings it up all the time.

The press, though, is happy to echo McCain's claim that "One of the things I've never tried to do is exploit my Vietnam service to my country because it would be totally inappropriate to do so." He is too modest, we are often told, and has too much reverence for that time in his life and the people he suffered alongside. But this claim is belied by what he has done in this campaign -- and what he has done in every campaign he has ever run. When Barack Obama criticized McCain's failure to support Jim Webb's new G.I. Bill, McCain hit back by saying, "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did." The fact that Obama specifically cited his respect for McCain's service didn't keep him from playing the "I was there, punk!" card.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_pow_dodge

a guy who received HIS medals for the very same situation where he claimed that Kerry lied to get his ...

McCain has the testimony of his fellow POWs ... now, who would want to say anything bad about a guy you were stuck in hell with? Naw, they wouldn't want to say anything bad about McCain, because he'd really turn the tables on them (with his anger), especially when Daddy was an Admiral ...