Meghan McCain's Take on the Child Detention Scandal Is Repulsive Even for Her

Meghan McCain’s superhuman ability to make everything about Meghan McCain reached new heights on Tuesday’s edition of The View, in which she managed to tie the ongoing scandal around the appalling detention of immigrant children back to—you guessed it—herself.

McCain readily agreed with her co-hosts that the detention centers were “horrific,” but she had a quibble with the fact that some people who had visited the detention centers had compared them to “torture facilities.” Here’s what she said (emphasis mine):

Calling these places torture facilities—I understand it is a humanitarian crisis. It is horrific to detain—like you said, people in jail get soap and toothpaste. But I know what a torture facility looks like. I’ve been to one. Listen to me—excuse me. When you have a facility where the specific purpose is to torture people, that is not what’s going on. Yes, it’s inhumane, but there’s a big difference between a Hanoi Hilton and what’s happening at the border right now.

Yes yes, it’s bad, but the most important thing to know about what’s happening is that we should disregard the word of trained experts who actually went to these places because they can’t be as bad as the Vietnamese prisoner of war camp where Meghan McCain’s father was almost 50 years ago. I guess that’s the standard we’re working with now?

“Kids are dying inside of them,” Sunny Hostin replied heatedly. “We shouldn’t play semantics with what we’re calling them. We should care about the dead kids that have come out of them.” A reasonable point, but one McCain could not countenance.

“Well, my father couldn’t lift me above his head as a child because of his torture wounds so I do think that hyperbole is important,” McCain said. That’s right: what matters in this situation where children are dying and being mistreated is whether it matches up to what Meghan McCain’s childhood was like. Truly, truly something to see.