Yes, it is “granting him” the “modified” interpretation.
So the quote is: I would support ways of bringing him home, and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider.
I don’t see how you’re parsing this to mean what you think it means. Why doesn’t this sentence mean “I would support ways of bringing him home, and if exchange was one of those ways, I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider”? I just don’t see how a meaning of “I would support ways of bringing him home, and if the exchange was one of those terrorists, I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider” is grammatically correct.
You’d have better luck, IMO, defending him on the basis that he said we should just THINK about it, not that it was an automatic “let’s do it.”
I’ll decline your attempt at a distraction from the issue, which is that McCain never says that he supports an exchange of only one terrorist.
So ‘if exchange was one of [the five terrorists]’…??? Huh? What does ‘exchange was a terrorist’ mean?
Are you saying that McCain doesn’t know proper grammar, but you’re able to suss out what he meant, even though what he actually said with proper grammar means something totally different? Please explain.
If it did, there wouldn’t be an editorial blasting him for changing his mind, would there?
It’s over. You’re wrong.
“I would support ways of bringing him home, and if exchange was [a terrorist]…”
If exchange was a terrorist, we should absolutely go after exchange and bring exchange to justice. In fact, I declare a war on exchange! Down with exchange!
It’s conversational English. Sometimes people omit prepositions. McCain is not the most eloquent speaker. It still makes perfect sense. And as I pointed out before, not just to me.
Another account of McCain’s prior albeit reluctant support of the deal, written well before it was concluded.
It blasts him in spite of the fact that he said he’d be for it if it was only for one terrorist. Did you read the editorial? I think you didn’t.
Yes, he does. And as I pointed out, it’s not just me who thinks that. I would suggest that the Forbes editorial writer knows English pretty well. Don’t you think so?
It’s not conversational english. It’s incorrect english. In conversational english, in this sentence, “one of them” refers to the “ways of bringing him home”.
There’s no reading of english, even slang, colloquial, conversation, or any other, that would interpret McCain’s statement of “one of them” as anything but the “ways of bringing him home” he mentioned in the immediately preceding phrase.
No, it’s just you. It’s not at all clear that the Forbes editor agrees with you.
As I said, you’re wrong, and the Forbes editorial writer, who, I think you would agree, is proficient in English, agrees with me.
I disagree, but be that as it may, I would like to humbly propose that the quote, in a vacuum, lends itself to the vast majority of readers and listeners as referring to ways of release, not numbers of terrorists, and that it would be disingenuous of McCain to argue (although he is not, as far as I know, and that seems significant) that we “should have known” what he meant based on that quote alone, despite your point of view.
If he doesn’t, cite the “now” McCain utterance that he was referring to. Your refusal to do so makes you wrong.
Further, it doesn’t matter what the Forbes guy thinks, because the video is there and McCain speaks clearly.
He speaks with proper, grammatically correct english. And in proper, grammatically correct english, he says he supports a prisoner exchange. He mentions no number of prisoners except, earlier in the interview, the five “hard-core Taliban leaders”.
So McCain speaks properly, and the meaning is clear. Terr (and no one else) is saying that McCain’s proper, grammatically correct english is actually not what he meant.
Wrong. The Forbes editorial writer agrees with me on what McCain was saying.
Wrong. The Forbes writer says this:
“The only problem is that just three months ago, Senator McCain, appearing on CNN, voiced his support for the very same deal that he now finds to be so profoundly disturbing.”
The very same deal. Very same. The same deal. Voiced his support.
The Forbes editor is pointing out that McCain now opposes the very same deal that, three months earlier, he supported.
The same deal. The very same deal. McCain supported it.
The Forbes writer does not agree with you.
So even the *writer *didn’t think about what he was saying either, huh? But *you *know what he meant even if *he *didn’t.
That is not a fact.
I know what the whole thing says. You don’t.
This is so much fun. Terr is wrong a lot, but this is the wrongest (and most obviously, clearly, and provably wrong) I can remember him being.
Terr, sometimes you just make me so damn happy 
You’re conveniently ignoring “He later modifies his response to say that if the exchange were for one of these terrorists”.