Sen. John McCain’s subtle castigation and ostentatious exclusion of President Trump from his prolonged choreographed funeral events sparked some cognitive dissonance. Particularly since, front and center, sat George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

During the 2000 presidential campaign Bush approved circulation of vicious falsehood that McCain, who’d just clobbered him in New Hampshire, had illegitimately fathered a black child. (Political scientists deemed that the ugliest presidential campaign smear since 1884.) As a result, Bush won South Carolina to secure their party’s nomination and (thanks to a Republican Supreme Court) the White House.

Then in 2008 Clinton, who had long confessed to employing various means to dodge the military draft and Vietnam, shamelessly implored America to shun McCain’s presidential candidacy vs. Mrs. Clinton because the five-year prisoner-of-war might be a brainwashed Russian marionette, a literal “Manchurian Candidate.”

Nevermind that none of Trump’s innumerable peccadilloes approach Clinton’s serial sexual abuse of females, not only while in office but in the Oval Office itself.

The difference? Clinton is still a media darling and Bush is as popular today as Trump is unpopular (62 percent). Senator McCain thus proved himself the ultimate political opportunist literally right to the grave.

Martin Crane

New London