Okay, I'll say it. I don't give a crap that John MCain was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. It was a lousy, rotten war we should have never fought. He was a military brat who got into Annapolis (all fees paid by Uncle Sam) because daddy was an admiral. He volunteered to drop bombs and kill people. He wasn't a victim.
Sure he showed courage in enduring six years of imprisonment. I imagine his family suffered greatly as well. But every pilot in wartime knows this can happen. It isn't simply misfortune. It is part of the job - and John McCain wasn't drafted, he volunteered.
There are millions of people who have suffered as much or more than John McCain, and their suffering didn't happen because they volunteered to bomb other people, or because they engaged in risky behavior.
My brother was one of those people. Two years before John McCain was shot down, in 1965, my only brother and only sibling was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease at the age of 16. He endured radiation and chemotherapy, lost his hair and was constantly nauseous. He had two surgeries on his bladder as the chemotherapy had ripped up the lining of his bladder and caused uncontrollable bleeding. He spent more time in the hospital than in the classroom during his last two years of high school.
About the time John McCain was shot down, my brother began to have trouble walking. A tumor had grown on his spine and was damaging the nerves in his spinal cord. He had surgery to prevent permanent paralysis, and then spent a year learning to walk again, though he never regained full recovery of his abilities. Finally, it seemed he was well enough to go to college in the Fall of 1969. A few weeks into the semester he came home because he was having problems walking again. The tumor had grown back. Though the doctors felt he had been through the maximum amount of radiation, he insisted on trying a bit more, and surgery was out of the question. They began a course of radiation to try to reduce the tumor, and two weeks later he died.
My brother didn't volunteer to get this terrible disease. Nor was he even able to complete one year of college. His high school days were spent in misery, and he never even had a chance to grow into adulthood.
I don't feel sorry for John McCain. He experienced the consequences of decisions he made as an adult. My brother had no choice. John McCain lived, and my brother, whose pain was every bit as horrendous as that of John McCain, did not.
However, had my brother lived, his pain and torment would not have qualified him to be president any more than John McCain's pain and torment qualifies him to be president.
John McCain, without the POW defense he throws up whenever anyone attacks him, would be a pathetic old man who is mean, has a temper, has no connection to ordinary people, and is willing to start another Cold War, if not WW III.
John McCain would make a terrible president, and his having been a POW is simply not relevant, except to the extent that it may have left him with some lasting psychological damage.
And that makes him an even more risky choice for president.
