Yesterday John McCain was on Meet the Press.  The following exchange in the context of discussing the Afghanistan war reminded me of what I find so distasteful about him

SEN. McCAIN:  ...you know--and I sound, I sound a little tough to you.  But I just talked...

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

SEN. McCAIN:  ...on the phone to a young man named Todd Nicely, quadruple amputee.  I met him at Walter Reed, and he's now at Bethesda.  I'm, I'm not prepared to say that--to these young men and women who are putting their lives and their families on the line that we are going to leave it at date certain, which means we are pursuing a strategy that I think is doomed to failure.  We owe it to their families.

Nice dragging out of dead and maimed soldiers to make your point.  He does this in situations like this and when he’s talking about the importance of fighting more so soldiers didn’t “die in vain.”

America could very well still have soldiers in Vietnam, Somalia, and Lebanon going by the same reasoning since in each of those countries servicemen were killed and the US left without leaving behind anything that could be considered a victory.  In none of those countries did the US belong and there isn’t greater “meaning” to the Vietnam War because 58,000 more died in Indochina than Mogadishu.  It’s simply more of a tragedy.  

If somebody wanted to leave Afghanistan after fifty deaths McCain would tell us that we were letting the soldiers die for nothing.  Now we're on a thousand plus and he could conceivably still be using this same argument if the death toll ever reached 10,000 or 100,000.  There's nothing to accomplish there.  Yes, the soldiers did die in vain but it's the fault of those who sent them there in the first place, not those who want to stop this madness and make sure other parents and spouses don't go through the same thing.  

I read both Sydney Schanberg’s McCain piece in The American Conservative and Gareth Porter’s skeptical reply. I was pretty surprised by how weak the supposed refutation is. For example, in 1993 Harvard researcher Stephen Morris, while looking through a Moscow archive, dug up a transcript from a briefing General Tran Van Quang gave to the Vietnamese politburo four months before the final peace deal signed with the US. Quang reported that 1,205 Americans were being held at the time and even after the peace accords were agreed to, some would be kept in captivity in order to be used as bargaining chips in the quest for war reparations.  Only 591 were released.  Porter calls this the “centerpiece” of the anti-McCain case though it looks to me as one piece of evidence among nine others -- the majority of which he doesn’t address -- that are just as or more compelling.  The skeptic asserts

Many of the document’s figures, such as the numbers of officers of different U.S. ranks held, are so seriously inaccurate as to bring its authenticity into question. For example, it uses the term “prisoners of war” to refer to the U.S. servicemen held—a designation that the Vietnamese Communists never employed—and combines the powerful South Vietnamese corps commander Gen. Ngo Dzu and the powerless peace candidate Truong Dinh Dzu into a single composite political figure.

Now, this was a document that was translated twice, from Vietnamese to Russian (?) to English.  Actually, three times, because when the Vietnamese asked "what's your rank?" they translated the answers into their own language, too!  It’s not surprising that some of the numbers of different ranks held in captivity might be off.  Is it likely that in each of these three languages, the words for different army ranks translate perfectly and would have been captured flawlessly through each translation?

And when General Quang was referring to the Americans in captivity, he obviously would’ve uttered a word which meant something close to “POW” even if Porter argues that the Vietnamese never used the exact term.  Whatever they said, it probably became POW going to Russian or English.  The two Dzus might have become smushed into one person over the course of the conversation between Quang and the politicians or by one of the translators.

Finally, the author doesn’t address Schanberg’s point that nobody in 1995 had the incentive to forge such a document.

Porter accompanied the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia to Hanoi in 1976 and says that Vietnamese didn’t mention any other POWs being held.  As a friend points out, a centralized government like Vietnam’s probably assumed that any American delegation would know about the men their government left behind.  Perhaps the hosts thought that being the first ones to directly bring the topic up would’ve involved a loss of face.

As a matter of fact, it does seem that the Vietnamese were trying to communicate something to the Americans, and the evidence is in Porter’s own article.

The North Vietnamese did try to leverage U.S. implementation of the entire agreement, including the postwar reconstruction assistance provision (Article 21). But that came in negotiations that began later in 1973, several months after the release of U.S. prisoners, and the linkage involved the North Vietnamese implementation of Article 8(b) on providing an accounting for the U.S. Missing in Action and return of remains. The Vietnamese insisted then and for many years after that on U.S. implementation of its postwar assistance obligation under the agreement as a condition for carrying out Article 8(b)...

Furthermore, after the war ended and the Nixon administration reneged on the aid pledge, Hanoi gave no hint that there could be more prisoners discovered...

Instead, as my own notes on the meeting show, Deputy Foreign Minister Phan Hien told the Committee, “We are prepared to carry out [Article 8(b)] fully if you carry out fully Article 21.”

How much more of a hint did the American delegation need?

In the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign, I clicked an ambiguous link on an obscure website and stumbled into a parallel universe.

During the previous two years of that long election cycle, the media narrative surrounding Sen. John McCain had been one of unblemished heroism and selfless devotion to his fellow servicemen. Thousands of stories on television and in print had told of his brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, his steely refusal to crack, and his later political career aimed at serving the needs of fellow Vietnam veterans. This storyline had first reached the national stage during his 2000 campaign, then returned with even greater force as he successfully sought the 2008 Republican nomination. Seemingly accepted by all, this history became a centerpiece of his campaign. McCain’s supporters touted his heroism as proof that he possessed the character to be entrusted with America’s highest office, while his detractors merely sought to change the subject.

Once I clicked that link, I encountered a very different John McCain.

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I'd been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I'd been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners. [emphasis added]

John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics. But two people who attended the session say they were taken aback by McCain's anger...

"He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."

McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

In 2006 and 2007, McCain was a leader on immigration, but his efforts ran aground largely because his legislation included what many Republicans derisively characterized as "amnesty," a pathway to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants if they took a series of steps to earn legal status.

John McCain now believes in militarizing the border.  I wonder what changed his mind.

Does he know he's lying or does being a politician for a really long time make you able to convince yourself you believe something new whenever it's politically expedient?