And he wasn't even that good a P.O.W.

A cover story by Tim Dickinson in the new Rolling Stone buries John McCain with a profile that achieves the unimaginable. It makes me feel sorry for him.

It's a brutal portrait of a serial louse - a detailed shiv job that shows the Republican presidential nominee to be a spoiled rascal who ditched three jets, one crippled wife and all of his ethical stands to keep climbing after the one command that would top those of his father and grandfather.

I can't attest to the quality of the reporting, but I would have liked to have read something positive about him in all those words. It goes as far as saying he was tortured for only two years in Hanoi. Only.

It's a far cry from this 2000 profile of McCain in Rolling Stone, by the late David Foster Wallace, who might have nailed the bigger picture in his classic piece, which began by asking if anyone who read the rock and roll magazine would actually vote.