The Sacred McCow

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Mary Lyon

I guess this is proof, after a fashion, that the war has indeed followed us home. Some of our leading veterans-turned-political-warriors, from John McCain to Wesley Clark and Jim Webb, and even a fresh-outta-mothballs Swiftboater seem to have decided that – never mind “fighting ‘em over there” - the order of the day really is to “fight ‘em here” after all.

It starts, as it always does anymore, with Republican presidential hopeful John McCain’s prisoner-of-war status. It’s the single most distinctive thing most Americans know about him. Shot down during the Vietnam War and taken up residence, the hard way, in the so-called “Hanoi Hilton.” There isn’t a politician, pundit, or voter alive, from liberal to conservative, military or civilian, campaign ally or competitor, who hasn’t acknowledged that – in a positive and respectful way. And despite his and his supporters’ protestations, nobody is taking its name in vain. Unlike so many other Republican leading lights, McCain actually did wear his country’s uniform, see combat, and shed blood and even those many millions of us who won’t be voting for him still honor that.

Perhaps that aspect of McCain’s back story is so prevalent because neither he nor Barack Obama seems willing to leave it alone. Obama sometimes sounds almost like he’d rather be McCain’s PR manager than his Democratic opponent, carrying on at almost every turn, almost rhapsodically, about The War Record. With McCain himself, it’s more or less all he has, as far as solid cards to play. Everything else about him involves either evasive maneuvers about where he’s stood on any number of issues over the years, or his embrace of so much of Governance-According-to-George-W.-Bush that he’s understandably billed by critics as running for Bush’s “third term.”

Perhaps that’s why he’s so sensitive about it. Evidently, as all Team McCain members vehemently insist, that’s off-limits. It’s actually another one of those World’s Biggest Republican Entitlement Programs: that John McCain’s military background renders him unassailably immune to ANY sort of objection you might raise. He’s the MC Hammer of the GOP with his own personalized cover of “You Can’t Touch This.”