Staged Indignation

It's clear from this that the reason the "McCain getting shot down is not a good reason to make him President" story is still alive is because the McCain camp wants it to be. And the press is happy to comply.

But are the McCain people doing the smart thing? Taken on its own merits, Clark's comment is obviously true, whether it pertains to McCain or Joe Smith. By calling attention to the criticism, which would have gone unheard otherwise, they're making a bet they can get more people indignant about McCain's military service being (supposedly) dissed than people saying, "Well, yeah, I guess being a former POW doesn't automatically make you President material." But if those people can read, they'll see his service was not being dissed. And then they'll look at McCain and say, "What's with you?"

My guess is we'll see nothing in the polls to indicate this has been worth McCain's time and money. Let's see.

Update: Maureen Dowd is interesting on this today. Her concluding paragraphs:

When McCain zoomed in the New Hampshire polls in 2000, W.’s supporters insinuated that McCain’s years in Vietcong dungeons, including two suicide attempts, left him with snakes in his head.

Now McCain is trying to magnify the words of Obama surrogates on Vietnam to tarnish his self-styled postpartisan rival as partisan. On the way to Colombia, he talked about Clark and said it was time for Obama to “cut him loose.”

Yet McCain himself has joked: “It doesn’t take a lot of talent to get shot down. I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane.”

Maybe instead of refighting the Vietnam War while we’re still fighting the Iraq war, the candidates can figure out how to feed the world, find enough fuel for everyone and oh, yeah, catch that bin Laden fiend who’s running around free.

In McCain's defense, it could be his experience with GWB in 2000 that makes McCain squawk so loudly about this now. If that's the case, it's understandable. But it doesn't make it smart.