Over on Newsvine, I am asked if I believe that John McCain has lied about or embellished his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I reply (elaborating some thoughts previously presented here), as follows, 

Lied? No? Embellished? Perhaps. Exaggerated the importance of? That, to me, is the critical point. My daughter and son-in-law both went to Annapolis. The daughter became a Navy helicopter pilot, the son-in-law a Marine fighter pilot. Both have been to our wars in the Middle East, and he was one of the folks flying the jets providing close ground support for the Marine assault on Fallujah. I am not anti-military, and, from talking with them, I know that “@!$%# happens.” That John McCain was following orders, flying a mission and got shot down is a good example. That John McCain refused a deal that would have gotten him early release from the Hanoi Hilton by exploiting his father’s status as a U.S. Navy admiral commanding forces in the Vietnam theater was a heroic act.

That said, I question whether that heroic act makes him particularly qualified to be President of the United states. I have in my library a book that lists all of the winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor up to the late 1990s. Each was recognized by the military itself as having demonstrated a higher order of heroism than John McCain. But was each and every one of them thus better qualified than John McCain to be President? Not necessarily.

When I read accounts of John McCain’s behavior in Vietnam I see evidence that he was a hot-tempered young man inclined to break rules and get in the face of people in charge of enforcing them. At Annapolis, he made an ass of himself. At the Hanoi Hilton, he behaved the same way. Later, the same sort of behavior earned him the reputation of a “maverick,” i.e., a loose cannon. He could not be counted on to toe the party line; but neither could he be counted on for the punctilious observance of legal and ethical norms that would have kept him clear of the Keating Five scandal. Since being slimed by the Bush machine in South Carolina in 2000, he has demonstrated an increasing degree of, what should we call it? Let’s say “moral flexibility,” pandering to those he once spoke out against in naked pursuit of power and resorting to a campaign of character assassination when, it appeared, nothing else would work.

Now, as I’ve written elsewhere, the clay of which this hero’s feet are made is well above the knees. He continues to demonstrate the juvenile hot temper and disregard for the rules displayed by the younger John McCain. He has embraced the slime and corruption of the machine that elected George W. Bush and has put the Republic in its current perilous state.

I won’t be voting for him.