In late May, John McCain announced his belief that U.S. troops in Iraq “have drawn down to pre-surge levels.” That was clearly not the case. But instead of simply acknowledging the error, the McCain campaign insisted the senator was actually right, just so long as we overlook “the tense of the verb.”
The same folks who lambasted Bill Clinton for parsing the meaning of the word “is,” had begun parsing the meaning of the word “have,” all in the hopes of pretending John McCain knows what he’s talking about.
Here we are, two months later, and in a dramatic error, McCain told Katie Couric that it’s “just a matter of history” that Bush’s “surge” policy “began the Anbar awakening.” That, of course, is backwards. But instead of simply acknowledging the error and correcting the record, McCain has decided to parse the meaning of the word “surge.”
This may be the single most mind-numbing campaign development in recent political history. The clip is from last night’s “Countdown,” and it’s really worth watching in full, but for those who can’t watch clips online, McCain appeared in the cheese aisle of a Bethlehem, Pa., grocery store yesterday, to explain why the surge isn’t really the surge, and why his obvious error was actually completely right.
“A surge is really a counterinsurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components,” McCain said. “And this counterinsurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province relatively on his own.” A reporter asked, “So when you say ‘surge’, then you’re not referring just to the one that President Bush initiated; you’re saying it goes back several months before that?” McCain replied, “Yes, and again, because of my visits to Iraq, I was briefed by Colonel McFarland in December of 2006 where he outlined what was succeeding there in this counterinsurgency strategy which we all know of now as the surge.”
I’m beginning to think there’s something very wrong with John McCain.
In our reality, McCain made a mistake. The Anbar Awakening began in August 2006, the surge was announced in January 2007, and all of the additional troops arrived as part of the surge policy in June 2007. McCain, insisting that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about, rearranged the timeline to help prove that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I don’t doubt that this is terribly embarrassing for him — the surge is his signature issue; presumably he should know what the surge is — but by trying to retroactively redefine the meaning of unambiguous words, he makes an embarrassing mistake a humiliating scandal. The smart move would be to admit the error and move on. But not this guy — he’s fallen in a hole and keeps on digging.
At this point, based on his cheese-aisle spin, McCain is contradicting:
* Gen. Sean MacFarland’s own assessment of what transpired in Anbar province;
* McCain’s own remarks about the start of the surge policy;
* and McCain’s own definition of what a counterinsurgency is.
And where does that leave us? McCain’s argument effectively boils down to this: “The surge is whatever I say it is, on any given day.”
I have no idea if the American electorate is paying any attention to this, but by any reasonable measure, this should be a campaign-killer. If Barack Obama had made this kind of mistake about Iraq, and rationalized his error by redefining words in a way that doesn’t make sense, it would effectively ruin his chances of victory.