the narrative that john mccain is senile is actually intended to protect him from more direct criticism. his intent was transparently to carry out a bait and switch, to make it seem like comey is biased towards the democrats and that the investigation consequently carries no value. now, it may be the case that mccain has lost a few steps, sure; if you are informed, you need to do some mental gymnastics, sure, but if you're not informed, or perhaps don't know much about the process, you could conceivably be confused by the obfuscation. the thing is that this is so transparent relative to the reality that it exposes mccain as hopelessly and unworkably dishonest. so, you should not give him a pass on this - you should call him out for his malicious level of dishonesty, rather than pretend he doesn't know what he's doing.