Matt Yglesias

Young and Sweet, Only 72

Walter Isaacson chats with John McCain about Abba:

Speaking to Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Colorado on Thursday, McCain found himself explaining a recent interview with Blender Magazine in which he selected ABBA’s 1976 track “Dancing Queen” as his favorite song.

“What were you thinking?,” Isaacson asked him, looking incredulous.

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

Yes, yes, we get it — John McCain is so famously reluctant to discuss his POW experience or exploit it for political gain that he manages to bring it up in the context of wildly unrelated questions about his affection for 1970s-era Scandinavian pop acts. And wait a minute — Abba’s from the seventies! Spencer Ackerman notes:

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972. Don’t try this shit on me, McCain! Your POW experience has nothing to do with your Partridgey musical taste.

Something to ponder over your weekend. This is really kind of a softball question, it should be possible for McCain to give a more normal answer.