Too Much of a Bad Thing.

When even Maureen Dowd is saying that McCain is overplaying the POW thing as a get-out-of-jail-free card, then he really has reached Giuliani levels of saturation related to one subject.

Coming into this campaign McCain's POW status was his greatest strength and had he, as expected, used it merely as background music then it might have been highly effective. The power of that narrative has been obvious in the way in which Obama has always sought to praise his opponent's sacrifice for his country.

But McCain has attempted to use his POW status as a way of avoiding all accountability, and his team have, at times, appeared to argue as if the sacrifice he made means that nothing he has done since can ever be questioned without referencing that POW status. It's cheapened what was his signature tune and it's getting to the point that, if he mentions it again, audiences are becoming entitled to groan. Which is an astonishing turn of events. But, as Dowd points out, it's something which McCain has brought upon himself.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

Biden famously shot down Giuliani when he stated, "And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most under qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani... I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else! There's nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He's genuinely not qualified to be president."

It's soon going to be time to lay that same charge at the door of John McCain. For a man who claims not to want to talk about Vietnam, only his most rabid supporters could claim that he has not campaigned on little else. His TV adverts - when not vacuous attacks on Obama's "celebrity" status - have several times now featured footage of McCain as a young man in captivity. It's bloody never ending. We get it! He was a POW! Can we move on, please?

However, in each of the instances Dowd cites - with the exception of his music tastes - he is using his POW status to imply that his actions should be above reproach. That's simply ludicrous.

He's running for the presidency, he can't expect anything to make him immune from examination, and the more he tries to hide behind his POW status, the more he cheapens it.

In a radio interview last week, Representative Terry Everett, an Alabama Republican, let loose with a barrage at the Democrat John Murtha, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who is the head of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, calling him “cut-and-run John Murtha” and an “idiot.”

“And don’t talk to me about him being an ex-marine,” Everett said. “Lord, that was 40 years ago. A lot of stuff can happen in 40 years.”

The very same people who swift-boated John Kerry are attempting to imply that McCain's record cannot be impugned, that to do so would somehow be scandalous. And the Democrats have so far bought into that logic, as any Obama preamble on the subject of McCain amply illustrates. He goes out of his way - for my tastes too far out of his way - to stress McCain's heroism.

But the person who is threatening to make his heroism and sacrifice something which evokes a tut and a raised eyebrow - suggesting "here we go again" - is John McCain.

It happened a long time ago and, in an election about change, it's time McCain stopped trading in the past.

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