Everything after May 2003 doesn’t count

January 10, 2007

I’ll post the transcript when it’s available, and link to the video if someone posts it, but Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was part of a bizarre interview on MSNBC this afternoon with Tim Russert that might come back to haunt him.

The topic, of course, was Iraq. To his credit, Russert was asking the right questions, reminding McCain of his now-embarrassing comments from a couple of years ago, in which the senator predicted an easy conflict. I’m paraphrasing a little, but Russert noted that McCain said the war would be “easy,” to which McCain responded, “It was easy.”

I’ve been anxious to know how McCain could possibly respond to some of his remarks from 2002 and 2003, beyond the obvious-but-honest, “I was completely wrong,” which he wouldn’t dare say. To be sure, it’s a political problem. McCain said on CNN in September 2002, “I believe that the success will be fairly easy.” A few days later, he said, “We’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” Two months before the invasion, McCain boasted, “We will win this conflict. We will win it easily.”

Now we know the spin — just so long as we consider the war having ended the moment Bush declared the mission accomplished, McCain (and his like-minded allies) were exactly right. The “conflict” really was “easy.”

That’s the message McCain is prepared to take to the voters in 2008? Everything after May 2003 doesn’t count?

I don’t doubt that McCain has hired some gifted spin doctors, but if he expects Americans to buy such nonsense, he’s likely to be sorely disappointed.

I’ll update this post the moment I can track down the transcript and/or the video, but this is what he said.

Update: It’s even worse than I thought. Check the transcript after the jump.

RUSSERT: Go back, Senator, to 2002. The administration saying we would be greeting 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 greeted as liberators.

The poor guy has clearly lost it. This is almost a Bush-like level of denial.

TP has the video clip.

And, via Anne in comments, MSNBC has an even longer excerpt.

What is it about politicians and their inability to just admit a simple mistake.

Seriously? They’re human. They’ll make mistakes. Why can’t they just come clean?

For example: If Clinton had just admitted to the whole Lewinsky thing, it would’ve taken the wind out of the witchhunt’s sails and, **poof** no impeachment.

Honesty really is the best policy. Always.

  • The entire war has been easy for him and his fellow republicrooks. Their efforts have been confined to parroting the White House and smiling for the camera.

    Everything after May 2003 doesn’t count?

    If that includes the 2004 election results, I’m all for it. We can get Shrub and The Shooter on impersonating government officials. However, in the mind of The McCainiac, maybe it doesn’t count. Maybe he thinks there is a restart button buried in the depths of the Pentagon. Push it and all the soldiers come back to life, ready for another game.

  • If you pack enough sawdust into the crankcase I can see where McCain might sell that to some of the yokels. The part of the war that met the definition of a classical “war”, troops advancing toward objectives, bombing of infrastruture and removal of the offending government was over relatively quickly. I think Ed said 139 casualties. Unfortunately Bush didn’t know to quit when he was ahead. McCain is claiming the war-part is over, but he’s still a hawk and supports the non-war that is killing so many people.

    It all depends on whether people still feel the need for a protective authoritarian figure to lead them during a “war on terror”.

  • Anyone who can look at the chart of US deaths, and say that the 2,878 deaths which have occurred since “Mission Accomplished” (1 May 2003, deaths = 139) must have his empty head and lying mouth up his fat ass. It’s very hard now to believe that anyone ever considered John McCain a hero, isn’t it?

  • Isn’t this analogous to describing a guy describing his wife’s labor as “easy” because the part where he did something – namely, knocking her up – was easy for him, and long since past?

  • The war was relatively easy — it’s the occupation that’s been a bitch.

    In one of the other posts, someone commented that in Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech he refered to Iraq as a battle. Bush has always called this the global war on terror, and Iraq and Afganistan were only the start. W was staring off the deck of that aircraft carrier and was looking at the next place he wanted to invade. For him, Iraq was done and it was on to the next adventure. Lord knows where we would be now if the plan in George’s head came to fruition.

    Shortsightedness is the curse of the neocon. The surge is another example that neither Bush nor McCain are looking far enough ahead to weigh the consequences of their actions.

  • Wow, if that’s the best the supposed McCain electoral juggernaut can come up with, he’s even more pathetic than I have come to believe in the past year.

  • Is there anyone left in the GOP who deals in facts? It’s all happy talk and gibberish, 24/7.

  • When God is your copilot, you don’t need to bother with “facts”.
    [2Manchu]

    Would it be appropriate to make a snarky comment about God being McCainiac’s co-pilot in Vietnam?

  • as it happens, the precise thing i wrote in dozens of pre-war blog comments sections was “taking out saddam will be easy. dealing with the aftermath will be a disaster.”

    so i’d live with mccain saying that taking out saddam was easy if he would acknowledge that the disastrous aftermath was a predictable component of taking out saddam.

    which, of course, he won’t do.

  • taio,

    I would think that after his pilot training crash in Texas, and getting wounded during the USS Forrestal accident off Vietnam, God probably told him “You’re on your own, kid.”

  • I doubt it will haunt him. He’s now claiming, apparently, that what he meant by easy was that the military capture of Saddam would be easy. And it was. We may think that isn’t what he meant in his original statement, but he’s not likely to get called on it.

  • Ah, yes, the D-day invasion was also easy, and cost no lives – if by invasion you only include the boat ride across the channel…

  • ***…the 2,878 deaths which have occurred since “Mission Accomplished”…***
    ——————Ed

    …should each be represented by a flag-draped cardboard box, the size of a coffin, on the Washington Mall. You get film footage of THAT, match it to McCain’s interview with Russert—and it’s a bona fide, in-the-bank shootdown. It’s also a sure-fire way to drag the numbers for the whole neocon chickenhawk regiment down. If they sceam “unfair” or “unpatriotic,” just rebuff them with the title “murderer.” If they play the distraction game of “Look! A shiny thing!”—retaliate with an update and a reply of “Look! More flag-draped coffins!”

    And the MSM would certainly have a difficult time pretending it isn’t there—when all those busloads of tourists are snapping photographs of it. The Reich talking heads would have a miserable time of downplaying it, when it’s showing up on UPI, al Jazeerah, and Reuters. Tony SnowFlake would just MELT INTO A PUDDLE OF GOO if he tried to convince the Press Corps that “it’s really not there.”

    And for every flag-draped box, let there be someone standing alongside, reading from a few pages of information regarding the individual who is now represented—by that flag-draped box.

    Ante up, America—it’s “our turn.” Think it might fit in with the “Cherry Blossoms?”

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