It seems that John McCain’s presidential campaign thinks that thus far they’ve “underused” the subject of McCain’s Vietnam service. Apparently, using it as a response to every criticism isn’t good enough so I guess that means they’ll be mentioning it in light of all McCain’s positive proposals, too. “I was held prisoner in Hanoi and tortured by Communists who wouldn’t approve of giant tax cuts slanted to the wealthiest citizens and that’s how I know that tax cuts for the rich is just what this country needs.” Or something. At any rate, once upon a time McCain was criticizing John Kerry for talking too much about Vietnam, saying he essentially invited the swift boat attacks by doing so:

McCain said that he urged Kerry sometime ago not to talk about Vietnam during his campaign. “I did advise John. I said, ‘Look, you shouldn’t talk about Vietnam because everybody else will. Let everybody else do it.’ His advisers figured that was probably not enough, that he had to emphasize that in his campaign. In my campaign, as you know, I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t need to.”

Now McCain talks about Vietnam when people ask why he can’t remember how many houses he owns, when they ask why he likes Abba, etc., etc., etc.

Just as a heads up, this blog and your humble blogger will not be in Denver for the Democratic Convention this week. I will, presumably, watch some stuff on TV and form opinions about it. But next week I will be at the Republican Convention in St. Paul which should be a lot less fun but probably better for blogging purposes.

Steve Benen spies a parallel between Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden and Matt Santos’ selection of Leo McGarry as a running mate during the final season of The West Wing. There really are a somewhat freakishly large number of parallels between the Santos-Vinick race and the Obama-McCain matchup. It’s worth noting, though, that it’s not all coincidence. As Jonathan Freedland pointed out in a perceptive Guardian article some months ago Santos was actually modeled in part on Obama. Eli Attie, a writer on the show who’d previously been a speechwriter on the Gore campaign, was interested in Obama and called up David Axelrod to get insights on Obama’s approach to help borrow some material for the Santos run.

As Freedland says, we’re looking at “a bizarre case of art imitating life – only for life to imitate art back again.”

Maureen Dowd mocks John McCain’s “a noun, a very, POW” approach to politics. However, she writes:

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.”

Sam Stein did indeed note this, but I believe my man Spencer Ackerman deserves priority on this story. Meanwhile, since Frank Rich’s column also comes out on the weekend it seems like another good time to note that it sure would be nice if the online version of Dowd’s column included a link to the article she’s writing about. Just saying.

On the list of education problems facing the country, whether or not high school English curricula at tony private schools are adequately fine-tuned to interest teens in reading literary classics is pretty far down the list. Still, I suppose it’s a subject that may well be of interest to Washington Post readers many of whom perhaps send their children to fancy private schools. But while it’s fine for publications with upscale audiences to cover issues of concern to those audiences, it’s a bit problematic for them to conflate those issues with questions of broader national concern. Thus, Nancy Schnog probably shouldn’t have started out with this factoid:

It’s the time of year when I’m reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. “The percentage of 17-year olds,” it reports, “who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled” in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors — yes, 17-year-olds.

Realistically, if you want to look at aggregate statistics, Schnog’s students at the McLean School in Potomac, MD have very little to do with this issue. Rather, we need to worry about the large number of students, primarily from low-income families, who are dropping out of high school or graduating without acquiring basic literacy skills.

With those provisos, though, the suggestion that teachers should think a bit harder about exactly which books are likely to be interesting to teenagers makes sense to me. But of course tastes differ. She seems to suggest at one point that Henrik Ibsen’s plays are the sort of thing that shouldn’t be on the curriculum. And yet I definitely remember Ibsen — specifically The Doll House and The Master Builder — as some of my very favorite things I read in high school.

I don’t agree with it in every detail, but Jeanne Cummings has a pretty good brief overview of the growth in progressive infrastructure over the past five-six years, heavily featuring the Center for American Progress, and mentioning ThinkProgress specifically as an important achievement.