The Ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free Card

The "Get Out of Jail Free" card is held until used and then returned to the bottom of the deck. If the player who draws it does not wish to use it, then they may sell it, at any time, to another player at a price agreeable to both.
-Official Monopoly® Game Rules

Too Much of a Bad Thing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 24, 2008

According to Maureen Dowd, John McCain’s years of being tortured as a POW in Vietnam has given him the ultimate hall pass as she states in the following Dowdversion® (the only trademarked Dowd Rhetorical Device used in this very solemn column):

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

Maureen then compiles a list of the things that having been held and abused for five years gets you a free pass on.

Divorcing your wife to marry an heiress.

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.
{snip}
“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Pimping your wife in front of thousands of bikers.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

Being late to a debate.

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

Liking bad pop music.

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

Maybe if Dubya and Cheney had known what a great all-purpose excuse being a POW was, they wouldn’t have been so eager to avoid military service.