In a White House meeting, Kelly Sadler, aide to President Donald Trump, on hearing of John McCain’s opposition to the president’s pick as CIA director because of her past support of torture, said of the Senator, “It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.”

What a hard political atmosphere we are living in now, where one’s common sense of humanity is so abated. Think of a loved family member having an opinion or request of theirs dismissed because they were dying of cancer. How should any decent person feel? How did the wife, children and grandchildren of John McCain react upon hearing it?

Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said of McCain during a televised interview that he did not regard him as a war hero because “… he was captured — I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”

Five-deferment Trump should have lost the vote of every veteran following that comment — about a Navy POW who refused to be released from his imprisonment (when the Vietcong learned McCain was the son of an admiral) unless his fellow prisoners were also released, and who endured another four years of imprisonment and torture, which left him with arms he could not lift above his shoulders for the remainder of his life.

This bears repeating, McCain was no hero because “ … he was captured — I like the ones that weren’t captured, OK?”

Paul Baribault, Lewiston