Double Standards

I kind of thought Jamie Kirchick had a good point here but then I looked closer at the cartoon he's criticizing. In his view, Rolling Stone ran a cartoon that "propagates the smears directed at John McCain -- that he's an unhinged warmonger rendered mentally unfit because of his experience in Vietnam, a meme that's been repeated by a number of high-profile Obama surrogates over the past few months." But look at the cartoon:



That's not an attack on John McCain at all, and certainly not the kind of attack Kirchick construes it as. The cartoon depicts various obstacles to McCain's political aspirations -- George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama -- as his North Vietnamese captors. I don't find this to be a funny or successful cartoon, but surely nothing that depicts McCain's political adversaries as war criminals can seriously be considered a smear against McCain.