Joe Klein: Pointing Out McCain's Ignorance Is Just So Unsporting

Okay, so John McCain has no idea how many troops we have in Iraq. He says we have reduced our presence to "pre-surge levels" when in fact we have more than 20,000 soldiers in Iraq today than we did before the surge. And even when the current draw-down is completed in July, we will still have 10,000 additional soldiers in Iraq. So, despite what the McCain campaign is saying, this is not "nitpicking" over "verb tenses"; it's about the military realities and what they mean.

Ridiculously--but unsurprisingly--some in the mainstream media are leaping to McCain's defense. Joe Klein in Time magazine:

It is simply ridiculous for journalists--and political operatives--to expect perfect speech from candidates at all times. So I'm not going to jump on John McCain for his gaffery du jour. We are drawing down in Iraq, but not to a lower level than existed before the surge. So the old fellah was a month--and a brigade--or so off. Big deal.

There are plenty of times when the media latches onto petty slips of the tongue and declares them serious gaffes. But this latest goof by McCain is not an example. We're not talking about McCain forgetting someone's name or mistaking what town he was in during a campaign swing. We're talking about a fundamental error regarding the central theme of McCain's campaign. Remember, McCain's "expertise" on Iraq is supposed to be the main rationale for his candidacy:

Accusing Sen. Barack Obama of having "a profound misunderstanding" for the situation on the ground in Iraq, Sen. John McCain repeated his call Wednesday for his Democratic rival to join him for a trip to the war zone.

"To say that we failed in Iraq and we are not succeeding does not comport with the facts on the ground so we have got to show him the facts [on] the ground," McCain told a group for more than 700 supporters at a town hall meeting in the Silver State. . . .

The GOPer has taken on a more patronizing tone when discussing Obama of late--asking him to "listen and learn" five times during remarks today, just days after he rhetorically patted him on the head at a California rally, stating that, "for [a] young man with very little experience, he's done very well."

It's difficult to imagine a more pathetic display than this--for McCain to condescendingly sneer at Obama's ignorance of "the facts on the ground" in Iraq while unwittingly displaying his own ignorance.

Joe Klein may consider this "petty politics" on a par with Obama erroneously saying Auschwitz rather than Buchenwald in a reference to his uncle's WWII service. And I suppose it is, if--like so much of the MSM--you're personally invested in the myth of the wisdom and loveability of John McCain ("the old fellah," as Klein fondly calls him). It's going to be a long, frustrating march from here to November.

Defending McCain Makes Him Sound Even Scarier

You may have heard about the post by Zachary Roth on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review which criticizes the Obama campaign for the allegedly unfair way it has been using the McCain "100 years in Iraq" quotation, as well as the media for not "calling out" Obama on the distortion.

This has now become quite a cause celebre among pundits on the right, who are understandably anxious to find some way of neutralizing McCain's incredibly stupid comment before the fall campaign begins in earnest. Many are now using Roth as ammunition, using the predictable "even the liberal Columbia Journalism Review" framing to make Roth's post seem like an unanswerable, devastating blow.

Personally, I think Roth is very wrong on this one. I explained my reasons in a comment on the CJR site:

Okay, so McCain is in favor of our troops remaining in Iraq for 100 years "so long as American troops are not being injured or killed." How is this magically supposed to start happening? And since Americans ARE being injured and killed now, why is it okay with McCain that they are in Iraq (if that is his pre-condition)? On the one hand, McCain says we have to stay in Iraq now because there is fighting going on. On the other hand, he also says we should stay indefinitely provided there is no fighting going on. Under what circumstances, exactly will our troops come home? Sounds like the only possible answer is "never."

Not surprisingly, my comment drew a response from someone named padikiller, an irascible right-winger who entertains himself by reading CJR and then writing harrassing comments attacking the writers on grounds that are usually transparently specious.

In this case, of course, he is defending the CJR writer. And what he wrote is actually, in a funny way, quite accurate and revealing. Here's padikiller's comment:

Kweberlit pondered

"Okay, so McCain is in favor of our troops remaining in Iraq for 100 years "so long as American troops are not being injured or killed." How is this magically supposed to start happening?"

padikiller schools

The same way it happened in Germany, Italy and Japan (countries we still occupy more than 60 years after WWII).

First we kick the living crap out of the opposition until they can't or won't fight anymore... Then we install an American-friendly government based on a constitution we write and cram down their throats... And finally we babysit the Iraqis at gunpoint while we toss just enough money at them to keep them quiet...

What's so hard to understand about this?... Works like a charm...

One could quibble with some of padikiller's assertions here. For example, while it is true that there are US soldiers stationed in Germany, Italy, and Japan today, I doubt that any of these countries would consider themselves to be "occupied" by the US. But this aside, I think padikiller is probably right in his description of what it would take to create "peace" in Iraq on the terms that McCain and other right-wingers would find acceptable.

There's just one problem: Doing what he describes would take at least half a million soldiers (three to four times the number we currently have on the ground, which is itself an unsustainable force); it would escalate the economic costs way beyond the two-to-three trillion dollars we are already spending; it would produce a huge increase in US and Iraqi casualties; and, of course, it would bring with it no guarantees that the end result would be a peaceful, democratic Iraq allied with the US.

The entire plan, in short, is nuts. And there is zero evidence that it would be supported by any more than ten to twenty percent of the American public--if that.

So padikiller, and Zachary Roth, may be quite right. It's unfair to characterize McCain as a warmonger on the basis of his 100-years remark. He's not a warmonger--just completely insane. That seems to be the only logical alternative.

Fortune Magazine Boldly Endorses Health Care For Everyone Who Doesn't Need It

The March 10th issue of Fortune magazine contains an article titled "Why McCain Has the Best Health-Care Plan." After eight paragraphs explaining how awesome the free market is and how double-awesome McCain is for being the only remaining presidential candidate who worships at that altar, author Shawn Tully then confesses:

The problem with McCain's approach--and it is a huge problem--is that McCain ventures so far toward total laissez-faire liberty that he risks leaving the poor and sick behind.

A health plan that is good for everybody but the sick! What a concept. I guess the editors at Fortune talked it over, realized that the problem with U.S. health-care is that it isn't slanted enough toward the rich and the healthy, and were delighted to discover that McCain wants to keep doing what we're doing, only more so.

I guess in a way you have to give Fortune credit for honesty. I'm looking forward to further articles in the series: "Why McCain Has a Brilliant Approach to Fixing the Economy" ("The only drawback, for those who are really picky, is that McCain's plan could turn a recession into a depression") and "How McCain Will Bring Lasting Peace to the Middle East" ("The only minor flaw in McCain's peace plan is that it involves endless war").

Why Is Farrakhan Scarier Than Hagee? Look At Their Photos

Kevin Drum speculates as to why the reciprocal embrace of John McCain by hateful, crazy evangelical minister John Hagee--"a white Farrakhan"--has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, while Obama continues to get raked over the coals despite having disavowed Farrakhan's endorsement:

It's funny, but in a way I think this is a demonstration of the condescending attitude that a lot of urban reporters have toward evangelicals. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Basically, they figure that these guys are all lunatic nutballs with weird beliefs, and they're so used to this idea that they give it a pass when it pops into the news. It's just Uncle Bob. You know how he gets. If they actually took evangelicals seriously, instead of treating them like members of long-lost Amazon tribes, they'd pay more attention to stories like this and they wouldn't give McCain a free pass on Hagee's endorsement.

This may be partly right, but I suspect that good old-fashioned racism is a bigger factor. America's mostly-white reporters and pundits, and their mostly-white audiences, are afraid of the Black Muslims because they believe that the Muslims hate them and would kill them in their sleep if they got a chance. Whereas they assume that extreme Christian fundamentalists, while stupid, are not threatening to them.

It's the same logic by which the media, back in the 1960s and 70s, convinced themselves (and much of the citizenry) that Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown were more dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood.

Call Us Back When You Hit The Century Mark, Johnnie

Updated below

This new poll from the New York Times and CBS News offers voters' opinions on the three major presidential candidates on a spectrum of issues--which will make the best commander-in-chief, which could best manage the economy, and so on. The group of voters I'm fascinated by is the twenty percent of respondents who said that John McCain "needs a few more years to prepare" before becoming president. How old are these people? And how many more years do they think it will take before McCain has had enough seasoning?

Update

This, of course, explains what is going on with the voters who consider McCain too much of a youthful whippersnapper to be president:

The good news for Arizona Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is that most Americans don't think he's too old to be president.

The bad news is that most Americans don't realize how old he is.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Thursday through Sunday, nearly six in 10 underestimated his age, which is 71. More than a third lopped off six years or more when asked to name their "best guess."

Maybe if McCain can keep the rumor mills circulating about which blonde lobbyist he has currently boinking, he can keep people guessing about how old he really is. (And by the way, whoever does Hillary's hair and makeup is due for a bonus, since fully 42 percent of those polled guessed that she is between 35 and 55 years old, which is between five and twenty-five years too young. I could use a little of whatever pixie dust she's been wearing . . .)

Always Opinionated, Sometimes Wrong, But Rarely Hackish

If, unlike me, you don't spend much time surfing the liberal blogosphere, you may have a general impression that it consists of highly partisan attack dogs whose primary interest is not the truth but rather finding weapons they can use against their enemies on the right.

Interestingly enough, this is actually not true--at least not when you consider the liberal bloggers I most often read (most of whom I link to in the blogroll on the left side of your screen). Case in point: reactions to the New York Times's recent story about McCain's relationship with a telecom lobbyist. If liberal bloggers were merely partisan operatives, you'd expect them to be hugging this story to their bosoms. After all, not only does it take a swipe at the man who is probably the most important conservative Republican of 2008, but it also puts a few dents in what is probably McCain's single most important political asset--his reputation as a straight-shooter above politics.

But no. Most of the liberal bloggers I read have spent the last two days criticizing the Times's reporting, questioning the story, and in many cases concluding that the piece should never have been published. Look, for example, at Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Eric Alterman, Ezra Klein, and Greg Sargent, just to name a few.

Of course, all these liberal bloggers have continued to hit McCain himself--hard and fair--on issues where he deserves it, including those related to telecom lobbying. But they haven't hesitated to point out flaws in a story they would at least tacitly support if partisan hackery was their style.

And while this is a particularly striking example, it lines up with what I've usually observed in the liberal blogosphere. I'd go so far as to say that I recognize a higher degree of intellectual honesty in a typical day's offerings there than I do in an average op-ed page in the Times or the Washington Post. Which of course is one of the main reasons I invest time in reading blogs in the first place.