McCain's POW years are irrelevant

I wonder why McCain keeps relying on his five years in a Vietnamese shithole as a means to get out of any argument and why nobody has called him on it yet.   That story is getting really old.

Yet he keeps banging on about his stint in jail and his military service.  He even seems proud of the fact that he was among the worst performing officers in his class.

While having to endure 5 years of imprinsonment as a prisoner of war is a terrible personal tragedy, it is not something that qualifies you to become a president.  Or a physics teacher.  Or an auto-mechanic.  

Are we going to make McCain president based on pitying him?  Does he look like he needs pity? This is a man who has all the material wealth he could possibly need available to him.  He is wealthy to the degree where he has no firm grasp on how many houses are at his disposal. Meanwhile large numbers of people in the US have lost their homes.  To foreclosure and to natural disasters.  Meanwhile veterans of war, people who sacrificed their health, their future, their lives, are coming back to the US and finding that Their Guy, McCain, is not taking their side.  Either voting against them or not bothering to turn up to vote at all.

The contrast between what one should reasonably expect from McCain and what he enacts is shocking.  McCain didn't learn anything from the experience and is now abandoning his own, the veterans, while putting even bigger swaths of the population at risk of having their lives destroyed.

By the same logic that makes McCain's imprisonment in Vietnam a qualification for the presidency, should we expect the future leader of Afhanistan, Pakistan or Iraq to come from one of the many military prisons operated by the US?  How would you look upon a candidate that served 5 years in Guantanamo running for president in Afghanistan.  Especially one that was only too ready to let others suffer through the same hardships. 

Would you view years in a rathole like Guantanamo as an experience that in itself qualifies someone for presidency?

Of course not.

Fact of the matter is that McCain's stint in jail is irrelevant.   Fact of the matter is that it didn't even do anything about his character.   McCain emerged from prison, character flaws intact and not having learnt anything.