Whatever I might feel about John McCain’s conservative credentials, there is no questioning his service to our country. The AP obtained (for a second time, the first in 2000) a copy of McCain’s military record. For the record Barack Obama - who has promised to disarm America if elected - wouldn’t make a pimple on a bad soldier’s ass.

“From his five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp to his tenure as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, John McCain’s Navy record boils down to a series of unadorned paragraphs that bestow upon him some of the nation’s top military honors.

The Navy recently released McCain’s military record - most of it citations for medals during his Navy career - after a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press.

McCain was awarded a Silver Star Medal for resisting “extreme mental and physical cruelties” inflicted upon him by his captors from late October to early December 1967, the early months of his captivity, according to the citation. The North Vietnamese, according to the Navy, ignored international agreements and tortured McCain “in an attempt to obtain military information and false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

Which explains his aversion to waterboarding and other forms of interrogation. I disagree with him on calling those things “torture”, but not with his obvious reasons for doing so. He earned that right.

“McCain, now the Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee, was taken prisoner in October 1967 after he was shot down while on a mission over Hanoi. He wasn’t freed until March 1973, after the United States signed peace agreements with the North Vietnamese. His captors tortured him and held him in solitary confinement. Still, he declined an offer of early release until those who had been at the prison longer than him were let go.

That decision earned McCain a Navy Commendation Medal. Although McCain was “crippled from serious and ill-treated injuries,” he steadfastly refused offers of freedom from those holding him prisoner. “His selfless action served as an example to others and his forthright refusal, by giving emphasis to the insidious nature of such releases, may have prevented a possibly chaotic deterioration in prisoner discipline,” the citation says.”

In the danger which is a post 911 world there is simply no other reasonable choice for President.