ABC: Yes, McCain’s war injuries limit his ability to use a computer

Good work by Jake Tapper, who continues to play his coverage (mostly) down the middle. No mean feat for a Salon alum. It’s not that Maverick’s physically unable to type, as the Boston Globe insisted eight years ago; see today’s edition for a very, very, very belated follow-up on that. Nor is it that he’s perfectly able to type, as this HuffPo piece clearly implies. He can do it, but it’s an ordeal:

Assuredly McCain isn’t comfortable talking about this — and the McCain campaign discouraged me from writing about this — but the reason the aged Arizonan doesn’t use a computer or send email is because of his war wounds.

I realize some of the nastier liberals in the blogosphere will see this as McCain once again “playing the POW card,” but it’s simply a fact: typing on a regular keyboard for any sustained period of time bothers McCain physically.

He can type, he occasionally does type, but in general the injuries he sustained as a POW — ones that make it impossible for him to raise his arms high enough to comb his hair — mean that small tasks make his shoulders ache, so he tries to avoid any repetitive exercise.

Again, it’s not that he can’t type, he just by habit avoids when he can repetitive exercise involving his arms. He does if he has to, as with handshaking or autographs.

Yeah, he could get hooked up with speech-recognition software, but as another HuffPo blogger notes, that takes time to learn and time isn’t a luxury he has in the middle of a campaign.

Scott Ott of Scrappleface has thoughtfully produced a second ad for Team Barry. Click the image to watch. Your exit question: Why doesn’t McCain want people writing about this? Is the perception of a president slightly limited by injuries he suffered heroically at war more damaging than the perception of a president who’s not incapacitated at all but chooses not to go online because he’s old and wholly removed from the culture? I don’t get it.

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