Did I Say 100 Years? I Meant 100 Years.

So John McCain must have gotten out into the world and realized that people kind of don't want to stay in Iraq for the next 100 years, and they certainly don't want to pay for it. So he's sliding away from that now.

"The surge is succeeding," he said today. "We can bring our troops home with honor. And we can bring them all home or we can have security arrangements much along the lines we have had with other countries."

His earlier comment on 100 years "was taken out context -- wildly," McCain said. "But I understand that. We are not playing bean bag here."

Actually, no, it wasn't taken out of context at all. McCain was making the false assumption that Iraq is thisclose to being a secure civil society like South Korea or Japan or Germany, when that is clearly not the case. Heck, if Muqtada al-Sadr lifts the cease-fire that he called for six months ago, the precise moment when security started to improve, than we're going to be right back to pre-surge violence. There's no sustained peace or really any hope for it under the current situation. But this doesn't matter to McCain, who thinks we can just occupy every country on the planet:

ROBERTS: So it’s clear you have no regrets in saying that the U.S. could be in Iraq for a hundred years.

MCCAIN: The U.S. could have a military presence anywhere in the world for a long period of time.

"...and under my Administration, we will."

Actually, with just our current deployments the military is stretched dangerously thin, and it's unreasonable to expect that we could credibly wage another war right now. That's the mess Iraq has put our national security into.

The difference between McCain and his fellow Arizonan Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater is that Goldwater's slogan was "in your heart, you know he's right," and the media slogan on McCain is "in your heart, you know he doesn't mean it." That's a powerful hill we're going to have to climb in this campaign. But clearly, he's not hiding the fact that he advocates for more war as a solution to pretty much every foreign policy problem. The challenge is to rip off the teflon coating and make that stick.