John McCain is Obama's Sal Maglie

Back in February, John McCain told Anderson Cooper he would support "some sort of exchange" for Bowe Bendahl -- at a time when it was public knowledge, explained by Cooper on the same show, that the exchange being negotiated was for the five Taliban detainees who later were in fact exchanged.  Now McCain says that the done deal is  "ill-founded," that it is "putting the lives of American servicemen and women at risk," and  that the five traded detainees are "the hardest and toughest of all" and "wanted war criminals."

I am reminded of the sage advice offered by Seattle Pilots pitching coach Sal Maglie in Jim Bouton's 1969 memoir Ball Four:

In the clubhouse meeting yesterday on the Oakland Athletics Sal Maglie said about Reggie Jackson, “Once in a while you can jam him.” I could just see the situation. Reggie Jackson up. Pitcher throws one high and inside, perfect jam pitch. Jackson leans back, swings and puts it into the right-field bleachers. And Sal screams from the bench, “Not now, goddammit, not now!” (Kindle locations 4403-4406).

It's not necessarily inconsistent to have been in favor of negotiating but now to balk at the terms of the actual deal struck. McCain did leave himself some wiggle room in his February exchange with Anderson Cooper: 

COOPER: Would you oppose the idea of some form of negotiations or prisoner exchange? I know back in 2012 you called the idea of even negotiating with the Taliban bizarre, highly questionable.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Well, at that time the proposal was that they would release -- Taliban, some of them really hard-core, particularly five really hard-core Taliban leaders, as a confidence- building measure. Now this idea is for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details.