On ABC’s “This Week,” John McCain was in self-congratulatory mode. It was actually kind of embarrassing.<\/p>\n
STEPHANOPOULOS: Yet one of them, Governor Richardson — he’s coming up next — says there’s no way, no way the government is finally going to get its act together and make these compromises unless we tell them we’re going to leave and give a date certain.<\/p>\n
MCCAIN: No, that was what they said six months ago, that there was no way we were going to succeed militarily unless we told the Iraqi government that we were leaving.<\/p>\n
Look, their record is wrong on this. My record is right<\/b>, of opposition to the failed strategy that former Secretary Rumsfeld was employing, and advocacy of the one that’s succeeding now. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, it’s hard to say whether McCain knows better (in which case he was lying), or whether he actually believes this nonsense (in which case he’s delusional), but either way, for McCain to suggest his record on Iraq has been right all along is just absurd.<\/p>\n
His record is actually one of one mistake after another. There’s the pre-war predictions<\/a>…<\/p>\n
Sen. McCain on CNN on Sept. 24, 2002: “I believe that the success will be fairly easy.”<\/p>\n
Sen. McCain on CNN on Sept. 29, 2002: “We’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.”<\/p>\n
Sen. McCain on [MSNBC] on Jan. 22, 2003: “We will win this conflict. We will win it easily.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…and his post-invasion assurances. In December 2003<\/a>, McCain praised Bush’s strategy as “a mission accomplished.” In March 2004<\/a>, he said, “I’m confident we’re on the right course.” In December 2005<\/a>, he said, “Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course.”<\/p>\n
McCain concluded his misguided bragging by saying, “It’s got to do with experience.” If he meant experience in getting the entire war policy backwards, McCain’s experience is second to none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On ABC’s “This Week,” John McCain was in self-congratulatory mode. It was actually kind of embarrassing. STEPHANOPOULOS: Yet one of them, Governor Richardson — he’s coming up next — says there’s no way, no way the government is finally going to get its act together and make these compromises unless we tell them we’re going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}