This campaign cycle is going to be one nasty ride for McCain. His troubles will come from his own failure to uphold his duty as a public servant to the people. The pain he will feel because of that failure will make him wish he were still a POW in the Hanoi Hilton.
The only hope I have for McCain is that he undergoes a transformation by the fire of battle. He needs to get an insight into the reality of conservative values.
Of course he will transform, until after the election, just to fool the rubes.
A truly TERRIBLE and grossly ignorant comparison. Do you even know what happened?
John S. McCain III, Lieut. Commander, U.S. Navy
John McCain spent 5½ years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. Shot down in his Skyhawk dive bomber on Oct. 26, 1967, Navy flier McCain was taken prisoner with fractures in his right leg and both arms. He received minimal care and was kept in wretched conditions in his own words, based on almost total recall, is Commander McCain’s narrative of 5½ years in the hands of the North Vietnamese.
The date was Oct. 26, 1967. I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up—the sky was full of them—and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber. It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin.
I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection—the air speed was about 500 knots. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the corner of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off.
I hit the water and sank to the bottom. I think the lake is about 15 feet deep, maybe 20. I kicked off the bottom. I took a breath of air and started sinking again. Of course, I was wearing 50 pounds, at least, of equipment and gear.
Some North Vietnamese swam out and pulled me to the side of the lake and immediately started stripping me, which is their standard procedure. Of course, this being in the center of town, a huge crowd of people gathered, and they were all hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.
When they had most of my clothes off, I felt a twinge in my right knee. I sat up and looked at it, and my right foot was resting next to my left knee, just in a 90-degree position. I said, “My God—my leg!” That seemed to enrage them —I don’t know why.
One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly. Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.
During 5 1/2 years as a POW John McCain was 2 years in solitary confinement a program of vigorous torture methods began on McCain, using rope bindings into painful positions and beatings every two hours, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery. Teeth and bones were broken again
Various tortures throughout those years along with left arm was broken again and ribs were cracked.