Insane Lie of the Week

This award must be bestowed to John McCain, who needed to find a way to reconcile his current pose of "I always had problems with the execution of the war" with his earlier statements that "success in Iraq will be fairly easy." Here's what he came up with:

RUSSERT: Go back, Senator, to 2002. The administration saying we would be greeted as liberators. John McCain saying you thought success would be fairly easy.

MCCAIN: It was.

RUSSERT: In all honesty…

MCCAIN: It was easy, it was easy. I said the military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeting as liberators. Look at the films of when we rolled into Baghdad.

Yeah, it was so easy that the US Army had to invent the fall of the Saddam statue as a massive psy-ops event! Weren't people too busy looting the moment the government fell to be greeting anybody? This is an absolute whitewash of history, the kind of talk I expect from people who send me breathless articles that Iran is going to set off a nuke because of numerology. John McCain is delusional, and he deserves the barrage of negative ads he's going to get because of his willingness to see Americans die to try and defend his warmongering position, rather than defend the country. I think McCain is completely finished in 2008, even though the media water-carriers are trying to spin that his position on Iraq is noble because it isn't politically popular. I would rather be... well, anything, except for courageous but wrong and dangerous. It's manipulative of people's patriotic emotions, and they have grown too cynical for such agitprop in the context of Iraq.

Honorable mention, by the way, goes to Tony Snow for claiming that Bush said "the opposite" of Mission Accomplished on the deck of the USS Lincoln, when he was speaking behind the banner that said, um, "Mission Accomplished." Yeah, try to finesse that one, Tony. He said "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” How exactly does that represent the opposite?

And the unintentional irony award goes to the President himself, for saying this last night:

Victory [in Iraq] will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.

Probably because they've already tried that and it didn't work. Even though he said "the opposite."