I often forget that CounterPunch exists. But I stumbled across this while googling for something else. It’s the ad pitch for a special issue dedicated to John McCain. It begins:

Those who know him well regard him as a deceitful, violent, unstable liar who collaborated with the enemy and then postured as a hero. Meet the Real John McCain in this special, subscriber-only issue of CounterPunch newsletter, reported by Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair and Douglas Valentine.

Two things, one of them obvious. This is libelous nonsense. I know quite a few people who know McCain well. None of them think of him in these terms. But enough with that, since taking these fools seriously is better than they deserve.

But the second thing is sort of funny. The folks at CounterPunch should applaud John McCain if they think this is true, because Cockburn & Co. think we were the bad guys in Vietnam. If he collaborated with the enemy, they should sell T-shirts with McCain on them instead of Che.

Update: From a reader:

Jonah,
I not only know people who know John McCain well, I know people who were in the Hanoi Hilton with John McCain, and I feel sure that any one of them would gladly slap the author of this foul libel (it is way beyond slander) and demand satisfaction. It is a sad commentary on the decline of polite society that we can’t simply horsewhip such people when we accost them on the street.