"Wait -- which football team plays here?"

John McCain told Jon Delano that the Pittsburgh Steelers helped him endure torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors:

"When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the physical pressures that were on me, I named the starting lineup -- defensive line -- of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates!"

There's just one problem with that story:

...the Steelers aren't the team whose defensive line McCain named for his Vietnamese tormentors. The Green Bay Packers are. At least according to every previous time McCain has told this story. And the McCain campaign just told ABC News that the senator made a mistake -- it was, indeed, the Packers.

In McCain's best-selling 1999 memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain writes:

“Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.”

In 2005, A&E ran a movie version of "Faith of My Fathers."

And McCain discussed that precise clip on CNN.

The actor playing McCain, asked to name the men in his squadron, says: "Starr; Greg; McGee; Davis; Adderly; Brown; Ringo; Wood."

Cut back to real life. The CNN anchor asks McCain: "For those who don't know the story, were those NFL football players?"

"That was the starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers, the first Super Bowl champions, yes," McCain responded. But it's -- it was the best I could think of at the time."

The movie actually shows this act of defiance twice.

INTERROGATOR: The names of your squadron...
MCCAIN: Starr, Gregg...McGee, Davis...Adderley, Brown, Ringo, Wood.
INTERROGATOR: Ten points, McCain.
MCCAIN: Ray Nitschke, our C.O.

The Packers anecdote is not only a key part of the McCain biography, it's part of his argument against torture.

Explaining why he thinks torture can result in erroneous information, McCain wrote in Newsweek in 2005, "In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear--whether it is true or false--if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse."

McCain's valor as a P.O.W. is beyond admirable, but this business of substituting the Steelers for the Packers is odd, though as I said, the McCain campaign says this was an honest mistake.

Yes, a mistake he just happened to make while he was in Pittsburgh, a town with a singular devotion to its football team and the second largest city in a critical swing state.

More things I learned by reading the newspaper

It turns out that John McCain would be the first person born in the 1930s to become president, which may be more than mere demographic anomaly, according to this New York Times essay. I found the article fascinating because my parents were born in the 1930s -- my father in 1933, my mother in 1936. (The same year as McCain.) They are part of what is known as the silent generation -- almost, in some ways, a lost generation. They have vivid memories of World War II but were too young to have participated. They were too old to enjoy the cultural revolution that rock 'n' roll ushered in, and while they may have been sympathetic to the civil rights and anti-war movements, many didn't participate.

Interestingly, one of my favorite TV shows, "Mad Men", set in 1960, focuses on this generation, and it portrays them -- sometimes to the point of caricature -- as woefully ill-prepared for the social and cultural upheavals that were to come.

Mister we could use a man like Jimmy Carter again

Smarter people than I have already weighed in on how ill-advised it would be to suspend the federal gasoline tax, as John McCain has proposed. Let me add my own voice nonetheless: This is a really, really, stupid idea. Our so-called leaders should be telling us to consume less fuel, not giving us license to use more. (Not to mention the loss of funds for road and bridge repair.)

And I'm not letting the Democratic candidates off the hook. They can spar all they want over oil company profits, or who did or didn't vote for the Bush administration energy proposal, but I don't hear either one of them giving the hard truth to the American people: The age of cheap energy is gone, probably for good, and neither technology nor alternative fuels will save us unless we make fundamental changes in the way we live.

Double Talk Express

I hate to get all South Carolina on John McCain, but is it really right for his aides to be making not-so-vieled references to Barack Obama's past drug use, given that McCain's wife was once addicted to pain killers?

You'll note that the writer of the blog to which I linked interpreted McCain's correction of Obama's spelling of "flak jacket" as a jab at Obama for having not served in the military. I certainly hope that's not how McCain meant it. Because John Kerry served in combat during Vietnam, and George W. Bush avoided combat by serving in the Texas and Alabama Air National Guards.

Which candidate did McCain support in 2004?

Um, isn't there a war to fight or something?

The United States is under threat by terrorists, millions of people don't have health insurance and the imminent retirement of the Baby Boomers threatens to push Social Security into insolvency. Yet through it all, John McCain says he will find time to craft legislation that would impose drug testing on professional athletes.

"Major league baseball players and owners should meet immediately to enact the standards that apply to the minor leagues, and if they don't, I will have to introduce legislation that says professional sports will have minimum standards for testing," McCain said after returning from a European trip late yesterday. "I'll give them until January, and then I'll introduce legislation."

Would someone please explain to me why this is a matter that should be of concern to Congress? For that matter, I'm not even sure why it should be of concern to Major League Baseball. True, the athletes who play by the rules are penalized for doing so if baseball doesn't go after violators. Thus, baseball and its players union need to decide what constitutes fair play, and how that is to be enforced. But my opinion on the use of steroids is the same as my opinion on the use of any drug. Adults should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies, as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process.