Your guest's idea that John McCain is anything like the protagonist in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is jarring.

True, McCain and Robert Jordan are foreign fighters in particularly nasty proxy wars. But the resemblance ends there: they would have been on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and they were most decidedly different kinds of fighters.

Hemingway's Republican volunteer wielded small arms at close range against enemy soldiers he could see. The Republican senator-to-be dropped high explosives from an airplane on faceless people far below - some military, some maybe not.

In Hemingway's time, aerial bombing was not yet a conventional way to wage war. It was in fact routinely and universally condemned as a barbaric and cowardly act - terrorism, pure and simple. Who knows, maybe some quaint folks still think it is.

It was this sentiment that made the German Luftwaffe's bombing of Guernica the most iconic event of the Spanish Civil war. In Picasso's famous painting of that event, where would we place John McCain? I would have painted him somewhere in the sky.