Cavuto: John McCain isn't playing games with Syria

Why the war hero is above playing poker at a Senate meeting

So everyone's making a big deal about this famous shot of John McCain playing some sort of a poker game on his smart phone during these Senate hearings on Syria.

And everyone's offended. Commentators are blasting him.

Comics are ripping him.

They're all saying, "Mister get tough with Syria" wasn't at all serious about this super serious hearing on Syria.

Seriously?

Did you watch that hearing?

Did you get anything out of it?

Because I sure didn't.

Because more than three mind-numbing hours of it, and I still don't know why we're going in.

And I'm not at all sure whether the White House won't still do whatever it wants anyway.

What I am sure about is that we viewers weren't privy to the classified briefing these guys had afterwards.

The real hearing where I'm told they got into the real nitty-gritty.

Not this one, which was really more for show.

17 senators making speeches. And a White House foreign policy team not making sense, and no one making any news.

It was like watching C-SPAN on an endless loop, strapped to a chair.

So I don't blame John McCain one bit for playing a game on his phone while he was in that chair.

He knew this was all for show and one thing I know about John McCain is he's not big on show.

Good for him.

Because say what you will of Senator McCain and his views on this war, I do think he knows a thing or two about war. And is qualified more than most to talk about the dangers of war. And vague missions behind wars.

In fact, I think he's forgotten more about war than all his two-bit critics combined will l ever know about war.

So don't talk to John McCain about the hazards of war. I think he knows them quite well.

And don't lecture John McCain about using his cell for a few minutes in a hearing room.

If memory serves me right, he lived in a cell for nearly six years, a very different cell. A very different room.

Where the folks he was with were too busy breaking his bones and not these clueless critics today just breaking his chops.

But, of course, John McCain's too much of a class act to ever remind folks of that.

Too patriotic for that.

Too done with playing games to ever play that game. So forgive John McCain if he just quietly played a game.

A game of poker that intentionally or not, served as a brilliant metaphor for the not-so-steady foreign policy hand we Americans are being dealt.

I don't know.

All I do know is McCain must be one hell of a multitasker.

Because when the TV lights went off, apparently so did McCain's phone.

That's when, behind closed doors, he got these senators who were too busy bloviating, to start thinking and changing. Ultimately toughening up a resolution you may or may not like.

But orchestrated by a man whose war hero credentials you cannot debate.

It just amazes me that those who have the nerve to say John McCain wasn't being serious about terror.

Were at best, in diapers when he was experiencing it firsthand.

Forget the jokes that were torturous, they were about a guy who was tortured!

I wish the senator had said that. Reminded these far from heroic hacks of that.

But again, real heroes don't do that.

But I do.

Because I'm no hero.

But I sure as hell know John McCain is.

Just like I sure as hell know his critics will never be.

They're still prisoners of the same pathetic cheap shots.

To ever judge the prisoner of war who took far more serious shots.

If they ever thought.

If they ever cared.

If they ever just shut the hell up.