The View erupts when Meghan McCain complains her dad suffered worse than migrant kids while held as war prisoner

Meghan McCain tempered her outrage over the Trump administration's detention of children because she feels her father endured worse treatment as a captured Navy airman during the Vietnam War.

"The View" co-host agreed migrant children were being held in inhumane conditions along the southern border, but she found it hard to summon moral outrage.

"I just want to say one quick thing," she said. "Apparently, by the way, me saying, 'Can I say one quick thing,' is now becoming a parody -- it's just how I talk, it's one of my tics, I'm sorry.

"Calling these places torture facilities -- I understand it's a humanitarian crisis," McCain continued. "It's horrific to detain -- like you said, people in jail get soap and people in jail get toothpaste -- but I know what a torture facility looks like. I've been to one."

Co-host Joy Behar tried to push back, but McCain brushed her off.

"Listen to me, excuse me," McCain said. "When you have a facility whose specific purpose is to torture people, that is not what's going on. Yes, it's inhumane, but there's a big difference between the Hanoi Hilton and what's happening at the border right now."

Co-host Sunny Hostin argued that she was changing the subject by splitting rhetorical hairs.

"We should be less concerned about what we're calling them and what goes on inside of them," Hostin said, as McCain sputtered about hyperbolic language. "I don't think it matters what we're calling them -- kids are dying inside of them. We should care about the dead kids that have come out of them."

McCain insisted her father's injuries were arguably worse after he was freed from the North Vietnamese prison.

"Well, my father couldn't lift me above his head as a child because of his torture wounds, so I do think that hyperbole is important," McCain said.

Behar drew an important distinction her co-host seemed to be missing.

"That was a war, and they were grownups," Behar said.