Surely Knows More

This foreign policy ignorance from John W. McCain is becoming epidemic. He contradicted himself in CNN soundbites about the importance of Muqtada al-Sadr in the space of a couple weeks. He doesn't know what he's talking about and he'll say anything to make himself look like an authority. Joke Line has even another instance, quoting McCain as saying Basra was "not a problem" and that it was a good idea for the Iraqi Army to attack the Sadrists. Of course, he closes with this:

McCain surely knows more about the military than Barack Obama does--and Obama certainly needs to learn more--but McCain's carelessness and oversimplification, and wrong analysis, when it comes to the situation in Iraq puts him in a surprisingly vulnerable position.

"Surely"? He's been wrong about virtually every foreign policy issue for the past decade and beyond. Where is there any evidence that he knows jack-all about the military outside of abstract concepts like "honor" which box him into a reactionary, imperialist worldview? The guy thinks we should have never left Vietnam and that we only lost because we "lost the will to fight", and he's carried that anti-reality position forward to Iraq. What's lost in his "100 more years" comment is that he actually believes that the Iraq debacle is in any way analogous, and can ever be analogous, to Germany or Japan or South Korea. First of all, any "insurgency" in those under countries ended at the moment of surrender. Second, there is a historic "allergy," as Wes Clark put it tonight, to American troops stationed in the Middle East in anything more than a highly specialized capacity. Our basing in Saudi Arabia was a linchpin for fundamentalist rage and terrorist violence. McCain has refused to learn from history for 40 years.

The best thing that can be said about McCain's foreign policy is that once in a while he'll agree with you no matter who you are, since he's flip-flopped so many times that he's been alternately right and wrong. He even said that Iraq is nothing like Korea back before he had to make the analogy to cover for his 100 years comment, which is clearly working, and clearly applicable, so I hope you'll all write it on a signpost and put it in front of your house.

The cognitive dissonance we're up against in trying to get the traditional media to confront their own misperceptions about McCain is thicker than the strongest border fence that the Bush Administration has to waive environmental and land management laws to build. I watched Rachel Maddow tonight take apart McCain apologist Joe Scarborough, showing that Mr. Maverick voted against the Bush tax cuts and now wants to make them permanent, voted for comprehensive immigration reform and now says he wouldn't vote for the same bill, and all sorts of other panders to the right-wing base. And Morning Joe just wouldn't have any of it. He just wouldn't budge, lest his head exploded as his belief of McCain failed to match reality. Scarborough is a Republican and still an operative, but this is true across the traditional media. The media's free ride for McCain isn't likely to stop just because Rachel Maddow tells the truth. It's going to take a coordinated, citizen-led effort to force the truth into the debate.