John McCain, who has pretty much reincarnated himself as one of the sorrier hacks in the Republican party, yesterday produced the most embarrassingly misguided attack on Elena Kagan to date. He attacked her for her complicity in a policy that Harvard has followed since Kagan was nine years old:

HANNITY: Your reaction to her? Are you likely at this point to support, not support?

MCCAIN: Well, I’ll give the process a chance to work its way through. But I am still outraged. You know the members of the ROTC at Harvard had to go to MIT to do their training. Now here’s a school — the Harvard Law School can produce all of our Supreme Court justices, but Harvard will not allow recruiters to help young men and women serve their country in uniform.
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I am deeply offended that a school that models itself as the finest in the nation, at least they claim that, would not allow recruiters to come on their campus and ROTC to be conducted on their campus.

When exactly did Harvard ask ROTC to leave campus? “In 1969 … primarily out of opposition to the Vietnam war.”

And so pure and red-hot is McCain’s outrage that he has actually been engaged in doing something about elite institutions of learning that will not allow “ROTC to be conducted on their campus”.

He recently infiltrated a covert agent into just such an institution, Columbia University, an agent he provided with a perfect cover story. Purporting to be McCain’s daughter, the agent is ostensibly attending Columbia University like any other student. Her true mission, of course, must be to collect information that is deeply embarrassing or damaging to the university, information that can be used by outraged citizens to twist the university’s arm into restoring the ROTC program.

Sadly, not everyone who is aware of the underlying facts understands what is really going on. Here’s Media Matters, with a totally unwarranted slander:

McCain’s criticisms are incredibly dishonest. For starters, many academic institutions have long held bans on ROTC, including Columbia University, where McCain recently sent his daughter (and his money).

Just McCain playing 3-dimensional chess, guys. And totally faking you out.