That Was the Sheikh That Was
McCain’s attempts to get his cart before the horse analysis of the surge to make sense have only dug him in deeper:
Traveling Back in Time To Justify the Surge
Here’s the bottom line about McCain’s verbal typos: People would not make so much of them if McCain’s statements on foreign policy made sense in a larger, general context. Obama sometimes misstates facts that obviously he knows, out of exhaustion (like “57 states”), but he does not make extended statements or speeches about foreign policy that are substantively and factually wrong.
Politico on McCain’s Treacherous Tongue
It’s not his age or his mental acuity, folks. It’s because he “spends much more time than Obama talking extemporaneously, taking questions from voters and reporters.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” on Monday when he apparently meant “Afghanistan”, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition.
Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken “Somalia” for ”Sudan,” and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs.
McCain will turn 72 the day after Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) accepts his party’s nomination for president at the age of 47, calling new attention to the sensitive issue of McCain’s advanced age three days before the start of his own convention.
But McCain’s mistakes raise a serious, if uncomfortable question: Are the gaffes the result of his age? And what could that mean in the Oval Office?
I, for one, don’t think McCain makes so many “slips of the tongue” because he’s 72. I think he makes them because he’s not very bright, and really isn’t interested or curious or mentally agile enough to have the geopolitical knowledge and understanding that is essential for intelligent foreign policy.
Put more tartly, McCain really doesn’t know s**t about foreign policy.
Fun With Maps
Matthew Yglesias has some irresistible snark on that fictional border between Iraq and Pakistan.
Domenico Montanaro explains that McCain “probably meant to say the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as they were talking about Afghanistan and there is no Iraq-Pakistan border. ” Montanaro also passes on the Republican defense to McCain’s many flubs:
Republicans have pointed out Obama telling CBS he’d be dealing with Maliki for the next eight to 10 years. They have snarkily said apparently Obama wants to change the Constitution because the most a president can serve is eight years. If Obama were to serve two terms, that would be about eight-and-a-half years from now. Republicans also point out that it’s been 925 days since Obama has been to Iraq, but McCain has been there eight times.
And he still doesn’t know which countries border Iraq.
Do You Have To Know Geography To Be Good at Foreign Policy?
So far, Barack Obama has not made any faux pas in his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq — but John McCain has:
… In a verbal flub that will spark renewed recollections of his Shiite/Sunni miscue earlier this year while he was visiting the Middle East, he erroneously reconfigured the map of the world.
Asked on ABC about the uptick in violence by Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, he replied: “We have a lot of work to do and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.”
Iraq borders several nations, but Pakistan is not among them — looming between the two is Iran. (Pakistan’s neighbors, however, include Afghanistan).
Steve Benen has the video.
What the F**king Hell Is Wrong With This Man?
Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:
This is the lead on a story just out over the Reuters wire …
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend.The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator’s trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials’ visits to Iraq in advance.
“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.
The Reuters piece hints at it. But if Obama is going to be in Iraq this weekend, this is a major breach on McCain’s part.
Sneaky, Sinister Goings-On Over at Obama’s Website
Another example of pathologizing evolving responses to changed fact sets:
Obama, Iraq, and the Media
The New Republic takes the media to task for the way it’s framing Obama’s position on Iraq:
McCain [hearts] Iran
That’s what I gather when I read that McCain’s head foreign policy guru is connected with an individual know for leaking secrets to Iran:
Scheunemann was a core participant in the lobbying, plotting and organized campaigns of deception that led America to war in Iraq. He was a close collaborator with Ahmad Chalabi through the 1990s. [...]
…US intelligence later found evidence that Chalabi, in addition to foisting a bunch of bogus intelligence and lying informers on the US and pocketing a lot of US taxpayer dollars, had provided highly classified US intelligence to Iran. Scheunemann worked closely with Chalabi for years in his efforts to get the US into war with Iraq. He was also a go-between between Chalabi and McCain.
Could you even imagine the reaction from the right if Obama employed someone with connections to an individual who’s basically an Iranian intelligence agent? They would scream so loudly that he’s the commie antichrist his campaign would tank. But when McCain does it, a controversy is not even hinted at. Indeed, the media hasn’t even touched this bombshell, and the only reason I can think of for their ignorance is that McCain’s wang must taste like a lollipop.
Lieberman Gets the McCain Treatment From the New York Times
Did you know, or do you remember, that during Joe Lieberman’s 2006 Senate campaign against Ned Lamont, Lieberman solemnly pledged that he would work to get a Democrat elected president in 2008?
John McCain Can Do.No.Wrong
In the eyes of the famously liberal press, that is:
According to the national media, no matter what Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says, he’s always going to be a fun, straight-talking, regular guy. In fact, every little thing he does — whether it’s joking about killing civilians or simply grilling meat — is magic to reporters. Just today, when McCain joked about shipping adviser Phil Gramm to Belarus — a place still covered in radiation from Chernobyl — reporters gushed over the “trademark John McCain wit.”
There’s more where that came from.
Ed Morrissey thinks the Belarus joke was very astute, and he’s sorry McCain did not include it in his YouTube video about how he doesn’t agree with Gramm.
John McCain, the Bush Administration, and Iraq
Interesting developments going on over the past few days vis à vis plans and agreements for Iraq’s future. On Monday, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, announced that he wanted to work out a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops:
Because those Bush tax cuts have already worked wonders!
That’s the argument which John “I was against Bush’s tax cuts before I had to shamelessly pander to the right to become President” McCain offers against any economic plan Obama sets forth:
The Bush Legacy
The Bush legacy goes much deeper than the disastrous, ill-conceived, and abominably managed invasion and occupation of Iraq. Andrew Bacevich explores the war’s ideological underpinnings in a masterful essay published in today’s Boston Globe:
Questioning the Unquestionable
That’s the apparent shitstorm we have slated for the day; is it kosher to question John McCain’s military experience in the context of this election season? That’s exactly what General Wesley Clark did yesterday on Face the Nation, and John Aravosis took it about three hundred steps further when he brought up the propaganda film that McCain participated in.
Now, I think John may have taken things a touch far, but in general, and this goes against much of what I’ve been saying in recent months, I think you have to question McCain’s service.
What John McCain Meant, and Why It Doesn’t Matter
The story about John McCain telling a reporter for the Orange Country Register that he doesn’t remember the last time he pumped gas or what it cost is picking up velocity. Only now it turns out he does know. Via Patterico’s Pontifications by way of John Cole, McCain was quoted by Environment News Service, on June 18, as follows:
Full of gas
GOP presidential candidate and economic genius John McCain admits to not knowing what gas prices are right now, but to defend himself, he quips that he doesn’t “see how it matters” anyways. I guess consumer confidence dipping to all time lows partly because of gas prices doesn’t matter, either.
Just think: if any Democrat said this, the calls that he or she is “elitist” and “out of touch” would be screamed 24/7. But when McCain says it? Feh, the dude’s a maverick! He could boink Monica Lewinsky on live television and the media would still kiss his feet.