Dear Sen. McCain:

I duly admire your courage. I like a couple of your ideas. But we need moral judgment in the White House, so I'm going to lecture you now on right and wrong. I can do that, because I'm even older than you, and I've never killed civilians. Listen, please:

Bombing, invading and occupying the countries of people who have never attacked us is not right, it's wrong. It is a crime. Crime does not pay. Once you do it, you are morally unable to prevail; you deserve to lose. Even if you can somehow convince yourself that you're getting away with it, it's still a crime. Even if you think you can make someone else's botched crime more efficient by taking control, it's still a crime, and it would be wrong for you to perpetuate it.

The only right thing to do about a crime, if you're in a position to do anything about it, is to put a stop to it and see that the culprits are brought to justice.

Let me say it again, because you seem to be a slow learner: crime is wrong, and whether you do it adeptly or poorly, it won't pay, because it's still a crime.

This big national crime we've been involved in for five years in Iraq, which you've said was the right thing to do if only we'd done it better, was committed by an arrogant thug whose office you want to occupy next. You yourself have been attacked and slandered by him, or his gang, when you were running against him in political primaries a few years ago. The fact that you still abet that thug's bloody crime, after that, indicates that you are a really slow learner.

You should have learned the lesson about this kind of crime some four decades ago, when you were taught the hard way. Back then you were hot-shotting around in a fast jet plane bombing a city in someone else's country, killing civilians. You can hardly deny it was their right to shoot you down, which they did.

Your plane fell in a lake. That would have been the just end of it for you, if one brave Hanoi citizen hadn't dashed out of a bomb shelter and risked his life to swim out and save you from drowning. Maybe he didn't do you a favor; suffering in a North Vietnamese prison cell the next five years must have sometimes have seemed worse than death. You bore the punishment for the politicians who started and perpetuated that assault on Vietnam.

That should have taught you that crime does not pay. In fact, you did confess to your captors that you had committed war crime (though your boosters always leave out that part of your heroic tale).

Apparently you confessed only because of stress and torture, though, without really meaning it, because even now you're willing and eager to take charge of another politician's war crime and make it succeed, no matter how many lives and years it takes. Excuse me for reiterating, but that really does make you seem like a slow learner.

It's hard to believe that even one American with a conscience would vote to put you in the White House to perpetuate this crime, when we've just seen the appalling results of having another slow learner in the Oval Office. But American voters learn slowly, too -- if ever.

Please repeat after me: "Killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in their own countries is not good foreign policy."

Now, write that on the blackboard a hundred times. Thank you.

Peace. (You know: P-E-A-C-E.)

Sincerely, your elder,

Jim Thom