A reader writes on McCain's POW refrain:

This morning you noted that McCain’s constant POW self-references have assumed clinical proportions; I don’t know if he’s clinical, but he’s certainly cynical. Real heroes don’t go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about their own heroism  particularly in order to satisfy personal ambition like this:

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."  John McCain, "Worth the Fighting For”, 2002.

The heroes I knew in my youth  the guys who came back from WWII and Korea  never said a word about it. Our family friend Ernie, who had been a German POW for three years after being shot down; the only way I ever learned about that is that someone else told me  not Ernie. My dad  100 missions over North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, three confirmed kills and the Distinguished Flying Cross - never a word about the war; no, I take that back: on his deathbed, when we were alone, he struggled up out of his delirium for a moment and looked at me and said “War is the stupidest thing human beings do.” Almost the last thing he ever said.

We’ve all spent years psychoanalyzing Bush and his oedipal drama, his need to out-do his old man  what about McCain and his 4-star admiral father and 4-star admiral grandfather: think there might be any oedipal ambition there? Do we need four more years of this?