Oh, sure, everyone here caught that during the week, Sen. McCain put one of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" on his campaign conference call to attack Gen. Wesley Clark. We all caught the irony and the outrage. But you may not have noticed that this guy, George "Bud" Day, isn't just any old SBVFT participant.
Day has known McCain since 1967, when they were both in the same Vietnamese POW hospital for three months. It was the beginning of a friendship that has now lasted more than four decades, to the point that (according to the same story and many others), Bud Day was John McCain's divorce lawyer when he was dissolving his marriage to his first wife.
When asked in 2004 about the SWBFT ads, Sen. McCain said, "I condemn the ad, it is dishonest and dishonorable, I think it is very, very wrong," and "I hope that the President will also condemn it." Yet isn't it interesting that despite his close, personal, four-decade relationship with Bud Day, a man who appeared in the ad that McCain condemned, the Arizona Senator was still absolutely unable to exert enough influence on Day to get him to repudiate his "dishonest and dishonorable" claims when it would have mattered?
If John McCain can't exercise leadership over his closest personal friends, how can he lead America?