John McCain was a prisoner of war?

A John McCain ad airing recently in Nevada -- perhaps you've seen it? -- lovingly explains that when all the dirty hairy hippies were smoking pot and listening to devil music and having pre-marital sex outdoors with multiple partners, John McCain was getting tortured by commies and not having any sex so he should be president.

Assuming McCain does not win the presidency (a reasonable assumption given state-by-state polling nationwide), he will at least have racked up a singular accomplishment: He will be the most famous prisoner of war in the history of civilization.

It makes perfect sense that the cornerstone of McCain's campaign and the one thing McCain wants Nevadans and every other American voter to know about him has nothing to do with his positions on foreign policy, the economy or how all the mean gay people are ruining the sacred institution of marriage (Jim and Dawn Gibbons would still be in love if not for the gays, by the way) but rather, that he was a prisoner of war.

For one thing, the national media seems to think that not only is McCain's captivity a qualification for president, but a substitute for judgment, expertise -- even coherence.

When Bush, Cheney and friends made clear they wanted to invade Iraq because sending the most powerful military in history to kill Taliban stragglers in Afghanistan just wasn't hitting the spot for a nation drunk with bloodlust and demanding A Big War, McCain seized the pom-poms and hoisted them aloft in really a rather impressive burst of energy for a man who is the same age as Hoover Dam.

The media has never shown much interest in holding McCain accountable for his full-throated support for the Iraq invasion. It's as if the press merely takes McCain's warmongering for granted and has determined there's no point in exploring the merit of his militarist outlook because that's just how he is. Besides, he was a prisoner of war so reporters who weren't tortured by the commies feel icky raising questions about his judgment -- or, apparently, his grasp of the facts.

In March, when McCain was visiting some of the nations America has been blowing up, he repeatedly blathered on about how Iran (another nation McCain would like to blow up) has been training and supporting al Qaeda forces in Iraq.

Let's review: The al Qaeda evildoers who hate all our freedoms are Sunni. Iranian haters of the Great Satan, by contrast, are Shia. When not busy hating the United States, extremists in the respective brands of hocus pocus hate each other, and them working feverishly to slaughter each other's population is in no small measure what the Iraq thing has been about for most of the last several years. For McCain -- not once but several times -- to complain about Shia Iran training Sunni al Qaeda was, at best, a reminder that sometimes when geezers get stuff mixed up they just can't let it go. At worst, it was a display of breathtaking incomprehension, even for a Republican.

The media at the time was preoccupied running the rants of some Chicago preacher over and over again in a video loop, but still managed to give McCain's blunder the attention they felt it warranted. That is, they brushed it off. Even after noting that McCain had been "blurring" the lines between al Qaeda and Shiite extremists for nearly two weeks, MSNBC's Chuck Todd was enormously candid in explaining why McCain's jaw-dropping display of addled confusion on the world stage wouldn't matter to voters. McCain is "Mr. Experience," Todd noted on Meet the Press, and "he's got enough of that in the bank, at least in the media, that he can get away with it."

The control McCain's biography wields over the media was on oppressive display again last month when retired Gen. Wes Clark suggested that getting your plane shot down doesn't automatically qualify you to be president. Clark got pounded -- not because what he said was wrong, but because it was a politically incorrect thing to say since saying it would cause the media to pound him -- or so said a Clark-pounding punditry analyzing itself in a meta-media circle-jerk.

To be sure, reducing the political press corps to a jiggling blob of irresponsible sycophantic suck-ups is nice. But there's another reason McCain's presidential campaign is built almost entirely around the notion that he should get to be the president because the commies shot down his plane during the Johnson administration: What else has he got?

His foreign policy is "my friends ... there are going to be other wars." His economic policy, as ably and unapologetically detailed by chief economic adviser Phil Gramm last week, is for Americans to quit whining. His energy policy is to let oil companies do whatever they want and hope for the best, which would not reduce gas prices, if at all, until a preposterously mythical McCain second term (though, to be fair, the accompanying degradation of shorelines could begin in earnest during his first). And the most interesting thing about his health care policy is that it treats your employer-provided insurance benefits, if you're lucky enough to have them, as income on which you should have to pay taxes.

Against the backdrop of that inspirational agenda, it's easy to understand why the thrust of McCain's campaign consists of him jumping up and down yelling "Come on! I was a prisoner of war! I should get to be president a little."

Oh, there's a nagging concern, s'pose, that by shamelessly and brazenly exploiting an unimaginably wrenching and painful experience in over-the-top TV ad soundbites, effectively marketing his captivity as if it were a deodorant, a motor oil or some other consumer product, McCain is devaluing that experience, rather sadly, really, leaving one with the impression that McCain is not heroic but merely narcissistic and that any bravery or heroism that once marked his character was long ago subsumed by the naked opportunism and cynicism that are the hallmarks of the typical politician.

But hey, it's his history. He can do whatever he wants with it.

Hugh Jackson is a longtime local journalist, former senior editor of CityLife and the proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner (www.lasvegasgleaner.com), where he blogs.