Yeah. Seven years in a prison cell, alternately tortured and enticed by enemies seeking information harmful to your country and your fellow combatants, and maybe honesty's not the primary quality you're delivering there.
Maybe self-honesty, maybe, within a shell of something armored, cunning, and duplicitous as regards your captors and their right to know anything true is how you get through that.

McCain: "I have ALWAYS had 100 PERCENT, ABSOLUTE truth and that's been my life of putting my country first. And I'll match that record against anyone's. And I'm proud of it. And an assertion that I've EVER done otherwise, I take strong exception to."

Damn that's a lot of easily-deflated moral absolutes. Nothing like setting oneself up for public "contradiction".

"Seven years in a prison cell, alternately tortured and enticed by enemies seeking information harmful to your country and your fellow combatants, and maybe honesty's not the primary quality you're delivering there."

Yeah! What gave the Vietnamese the right to shoot down foreign aircraft dropping tons of explosives and chemical agents on their country, much less imprison those pilots captured?

Thank God McCain didn't give those animals "information harmful to [our] country." We'd be speaking Viet-French today!

"Seven years in a prison cell, alternately tortured and enticed by enemies seeking information harmful to your country and your fellow combatants, and maybe honesty's not the primary quality you're delivering there."

Yeah! What gave the Vietnamese the right to shoot down foreign aircraft dropping tons of explosives and chemical agents on their country, much less imprison those pilots captured?

Thank God McCain didn't give those animals "information harmful to [our] country." We'd be speaking Viet-French today!

Just in case you didn't get it the first time.

I'm willing to give McCain some benefit of the doubt on his personal integrity. But his campaign has embraced desperate, Rovian right wingers who are outdoing themselves and finally (for the first time since at least Lee Atwater) not getting away with their crap.

In a way, it's kind of sad that McCain is the target of all this long-deserved payback. And it's one more way that George Bush has shoved the consequences for his failures onto somebody else.

Career politician is a lying whore and hysterical drama queen. Stop the presses!

Cattin' around with Cindy while his wife at the time was recovering with serious injuries doesn't seem too damn honest to me.

Sen McCain fought the exception to torture ban
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/10/26/mccain_fights_exception_to_torture_ban/
and the Executive Director of Center for Victims of Torture http://www.cvt.org/main.php was pleased regarding the direction of discussion in the senate about the pending bill.
Then, Sen McCain changes his mind!! and votes against the bill against torture ( waterboarding).
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/mccain_votes_against_ban_on_wa.html and told GWB to veto the bill.
IMO, this is the biggest lie he has told the American public.

As a recovering alcoholic, I resent the implications of several of your remarks. They happen to be 100% accurate, however.

I didn't know McShame's dad was a drunk, but that explains alotta stuff. Clinton's dad was, too. Someday I swear I'm gonna research how many prezes have been ACOAs.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (I wish), evidence abounds that Doubleduh's sleeping with Jim Beam again. I'm waiting for him to pull a Yeltsin at his next press conference. That look on his face these days . . . I've seen it before, and it ain't a smirk. I just hope nobody let's him near the panic button, 'cuz a little nose candy's probably next. Wheeeeeeeeee!

Well, here's a man who has never told a lie! If he believes that then he's deluded. If he doesn't believe it........

I didn't know McShame's dad was a drunk, but that explains alotta stuff. Clinton's dad was, too. Someday I swear I'm gonna research how many prezes have been ACOAs.

Reagan's dad was an alcoholic. I'm sure there were others.

Dennis, I've seen Roy around various parts of the internet for years and I'm just gonna go way out on a limb here and say that he wouldn't deny that the Vietnamese had every right to shoot down someone bombing them.

One can admire the guts and courage of a soldier or a POW and think their cause was rancid. I once read in the NYT, of all places, an admiring article about a North Korean prisoner in South Korea who'd bravely gone through decades of suffering--he was, I think, the longest held political prisoner or POW or something like that on record. But the poor guy was devoted to the Stalinist government back in the home country. I should have clipped the article.

Um, to be clear, the South Korean government was also rancid--a military and/or fascist dictatorship until sometime in the late 80's, I think. (Too lazy to google).

BHO, Sr. was an alcoholic too, I think, for what it's worth.

Donald Johnson:
Thanks for the sort of defense.
Though being aware of the presence of and having a functional sense of where someone stands on a few issues isn't the same as knowing them.
If you knew me you'd know I wasn't using the phrase "Seven years in a prison cell, alternately tortured and enticed by enemies seeking information" as a means of deflecting criticism of McCain or attempting in any way to confirm his integrity or anything.
Merely illustrating the undeniable necessity for him to have developed a psyche capable of resisting probes for truth, resisting even the possession of truth, and doing it while he was under great pressure.
Like running for President, or being the President, kind of pressure.
Saying that the mechanism for deep dishonesty would already be in place in the man.
In much the same way, as mentioned above, children of drunks, and drunks themselves, and many other people in chronically dysfunctional environments, can develop an adversarial relation with the truth.
Which McCain already had, so now two mechanisms, or one that's been doubly confirmed.

Dennis Perrin:
I believe that's what's called a "knee-jerk" reaction. You completely misread both my intent and the paragraphs themselves. Maybe because any mention of his POWness has to be partisan?
The first paragraph says quite clearly that McCain has to have developed an armored resistance to the truth, and to questions designed to elicit the truth from him.
But if you're so gone into partisan politics all you can see is win-loss, I can understand how that paragraph might seem pro-McCain.

Roy, bad guess.

I'm pretty sure Dennis's reaction was to his perception you felt the Vietnamese had done something wrong in shooting McCain down, or were "America's enemy," about to do something to the U.S. He is an anarchist who hates Obama as much as McCain, and could care less about Democrat-Republican partisanry.

That was a defense, Roy. I knew you weren't defending McCain, though the way I worded my own reply might have made it sound that way, but actually, I was giving my own view. Your original post was clear enough---McCain has developed defense mechanisms.

I think I'm posting on too little sleep or something--the first sentence "That was a defense", meant that I was defending Roy, not that Roy was defending McCain. Okay, ignore me until some signs of coherence begin to appear in my posts.