John McCain a Hero?

In contrast to Ayers, whose acts were at worst tactically misguided, John McCain did engage in terrorist acts, war crimes that in all likelihood killed hundreds if not thousands of poor people in Vietnam. He committed these atrocities in the most cowardly fashion, dropping bombs from a plane thousands of feet above the ground, using the most advanced military technology to slaughter people in an impoverished peasant country. To those who would offer some banality about McCain just being a soldier or serving his country, such defenses are neither true nor legally relevant. McCain volunteered enthusiastically to commit these atrocities, and even if he hadn't the Nuremberg principles had decades before put to rest the excuse that one was just following orders. Indeed, as Robert Richter has reported, General Telford Taylor, American prosecutor at Nuremberg, even offered to help prosecute McCain and other captured pilots for war crimes.

Mr. Ayers would be quite justified in being disappointed with Barack Obama for his cowardice in this whole affair. In keeping with his characteristic unprincipled opportunism, Obama repeatedly called a friend who had helped him in the past "despicable" while characterizing McCain as a "hero" for the infinitely more monstrous crimes he committed. If his old friend, or just acquaintance if that's what he really is, had any sense of decency, Ayers would not be in this position of having to defend himself now.

It's also hard not to see a connection between all of this and the Iraq War. The media and McCain campaign attack Ayers and hold up McCain as a hero in order to further try to rehabilitate the Vietnam War and the American government's murder of several million people in Southeast Asia while also discrediting and ridiculing anti-war opposition. It is greatly to his credit that Ayers defends the anti-war movement in such strong terms in this piece. That Obama went along with trashing Ayers and glorifying McCain is a dark sign about his real position on the Iraq War, a subject on which he has already flip-flopped and proven totally insincere and uncommitted to the anti-war position that won him such enthusiasm among millions of American young people.

There was an unrepentant terrorist in this presidential campaign. Indeed, one who has built an entire career, and a lucrative one at that, solely on the basis of boasting about his terrorist acts. His name is John McCain, and it is time the media stopped treating him as a hero.

— DA, Cambridge, MA