In his victory speech last night, McCain said:
But nothing is inevitable in our country. We are the captains of our fate.
Kathleen Parker called it " McCain's best moment." But apparently it didn't sit well with Spencer Ackerman:
That's a misquotation of a line from William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus", which, it's worth noting, was Timothy McVeigh's final fuck-you to America.
Maybe I'm not so familiar with the works of William Ernest Henley as Ackerman, but that seemed a bit of a reach. And a few minutes searching on Google does indeed lead to a different origin for the 'captains of our fate' formulation: Jean-Paul Sartre. You'd think it would be enough to point out that McCain was drawing from the work of a communist, but why pass up the chance to imply a connection between America's most notorious home-grown terrorist and a Republican candidate for president.