Use It Tonight

Sam Stein points out that John McCain’s response to being hit on his multitude of houses was to issue the following nonsequitur:

"This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison."

About that. This is rather delicate. McCain, Sam notes, did the same thing when questioned on the Saddleback non-cone of silence ("The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.") and then there was also the POW-centric defense of ABBA. This is kind of, well, unseemly.

Real talk. What McCain went through in the North Vietnamese POW camps is an unimaginable, unfathomable horror. The word "heroism" doesn’t really capture it sufficiently. It is a singular experience, and it defies human nature to expect that it wouldn’t have been the crucible through which McCain’s essence was formed. But it’s becoming a verbal tic, the equivalent of Rudy Giuliani’s noun-verb-9/11. Does it honor or cheapen that experience to use it to bat away unrelated questions about, say, how many homes you own, or whether you truthfully entered a cone of debate-silence or what influences your musical taste? By bringing up the POW experience at opportunities like these, McCain is clearly trying to bait Obama into seeming to attack that experience. That’s a really unfortunate move that’s entirely beneath the character of a man who endured what McCain endured.