Rolling Stone mocks McCain's POW time

Rolling Stone illustration by Victor Juhasz

A commentary in a coming edition of Rolling Stone magazine under the headline "Full Metal McCain" blasts Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign aspirations and mocks his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"One long broadside against those g-d d---ed overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control," is how writer Matt Taibbi describes a recent campaign speech by McCain.

And the writings are illustrated by Victor Juhasz, who drew a caricature of a prison cell made of bamboo sticks holding a hollering McCain character. Three other characters, two grinning and one frowning, with cartoon-like Oriental features, are shown prodding him with more bamboo sticks.

The online version of the critique says it is being published in the June 26 edition of the magazine.

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"He seems re-energized by the fact that we are all back in that same hell, back to living the PTSD-inducing nightmare that McCain himself never got to leave – and if it takes dumbing down his act and playing to the Rush and Hannity crowd to give his story a happy ending this time around, he won't hesitate," the commentary said.

According to McCain's own campaign website, he was flying his 23rd bombing mission Oct. 26, 1967, over Vietnam when a missile struck his plane and forced him to eject, knocking him unconscious and breaking both of his arms and a leg.

Personal attacks on McCain's military record have been rare in the campaign so far.

In fact, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller recently reportedly apologized to McCain for suggesting that since he flew bombing missions as a Navy fighter pilot, he didn't care about people.

Rockefeller, a supporter of Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama, made the comments in an April interview published in the Charleston Gazette, saying, "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

Rockefeller later reported his analogy was inaccurate.

"While we differ a great deal on policy issues, I profoundly respect and appreciate his dedication to our country, and I regret my very poor choice of words," he said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.

A young John McCain

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McCain's campaign website continues:

"John was then taken as a prisoner of war into the now infamous 'Hanoi Hilton,' where he was denied necessary medical treatment and often beaten by the North Vietnamese. John spent much of his time as a prisoner of war in solitary confinement, aided by his faith and the friendships of his fellow POWs. When he was finally released and able to return home years later, John continued his service by regaining his naval flight status."

But Rolling Stone didn't pull any punches.

"Despite all the talk about 'change,' we're once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades – the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world. What's especially creepy about this flashback this time around is that it seems to mirror the tragic loop in McCain's own psyche. For all his frantic recanting of the many embarrassingly bipartisan episodes from his Senate past, McCain has never betrayed even a nanosecond's worth of memories from the central catastrophe of his life: his capture and torture in a Vietnamese prison."

Said Rolling Stone: "McCain can keep reliving all those old hurts and all those old battles over and over again, in front of sympathetic crowd after sympathetic crowd."

The magazine cites parallels, or lack thereof, between Vietnam and Iraq.

"Never mind that Iraq isn't exactly Vietnam, or that Barack Obama isn't Jane Fonda – what matters is that the Republicans nominated a wounded old soldier who now gets to spend the next five months trying to exorcise his personal demons, and this serendipitous circumstance fits nicely with the party's national strategy … It's not hard to hear, in McCain's quasi-coherent rants, his bitterness at being abandoned to years of savage tortures while millions of little Hillarys and Bills and Obamas-in-training were getting high … during the Country Joe and the Fish set at Woodstock."

The June issue of Whistleblower magazine also has been devoted to an investigation called "THE REAL McCAIN."

On one hand, the report says, McCain is a genuine war hero – a Navy pilot imprisoned and tortured for five years by the North Vietnamese communists, and who refused an offer of early release because of his father's status as an admiral, instead demonstrating courage and leadership during his POW captivity.

On the other hand, during his 21 years in the Senate, McCain has sometimes advocated policies, sponsored legislation, forged alliances and uttered statements that have caused fellow Republicans to recoil in horror.

And yet on certain bedrock issues, the report say;s, McCain has been consistently strong – for example, he has a long and reliably pro-life voting record. He's a fiscal conservative, shunning earmarks like few others in Congress. And he is strong on national defense, committed to defeating, not retreating from, the gathering forces of Islamo-fascism.

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