{"id":14915,"date":"2008-03-17T09:20:46","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T13:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14915.html"},"modified":"2008-03-17T09:20:46","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T13:20:46","slug":"mccains-market-and-the-mahdi-militia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/mccains-market-and-the-mahdi-militia\/","title":{"rendered":"McCain’s market and the Mahdi militia"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was, to my mind, arguably the single most hackish moment of John McCain’s career. Last April, desperate to convince Americans that he was right about Iraq, the senator toured Baghdad’s Shorja market, bragged about how safe it was, and touted his experience as proof that Americans were not getting the “full picture about what’s happening<\/a>.” McCain’s Republican colleague and traveling partner, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), described the market, the scene of often dramatic violence, as “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”<\/p>\n

McCain neglected to mention at the time that he was accompanied by 100 U.S. troops, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships when he “walked freely<\/a>” — wearing a bullet-proof vest — through the market. It must have slipped his mind.<\/p>\n

McCain returned to Iraq over the weekend, and CNN thought it would be interesting to return to the Shorja market to note how it’s progressed over the last year. The CNN journalists traveling with McCain couldn’t, however, because the market was too unsafe<\/a> for Americans.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

CNN’s John King explained that the network’s security advisors “didn’t believe it was safe for an American to be in that area,” which is “controlled by the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi army.”<\/p>\n

I wonder if some enterprising reporter might follow up with McCain about this.
\n
\nHonestly, I still don’t think McCain has caught nearly enough flack for his nonsense last April. He held a press conference in Baghdad at the time to literally mock reporters and others who questioned his assessment of conditions in Iraq. McCain pointed to his extraordinarily well-protected stroll as “proof” that he was right and everyone else was wrong. (“Less than 30 minutes after McCain wrapped up, a barrage of half a dozen mortars<\/a> peppered the boundaries of the Green Zone, where the senators held their press conference.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Of course, as any reasonable person could see, McCain set out to prove a point and ultimately proved the opposite. If the only way for an American to walk around Baghdad safely was to wear a bullet-proof vest, surrounded by massive military support, then it still wasn\u2019t safe<\/i>.<\/p>\n

At the time, locals were disgusted<\/a> by the senator’s dishonesty.<\/p>\n

A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.<\/p>\n

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal! … They paralyzed the market when they came. This was only for the media.” […]<\/p>\n

Told about Mr. McCain’s assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: “He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It should have been a credibility-killing, jump-the-shark moment for the senator. McCain was caught making up nonsense that no one, anywhere, could believe, about the world’s most pressing crisis. Josh Marshall described it<\/a> at the time as “an iconic moment, like but much more than the Dukakis [in the tank] image, since its ridiculousness can be come at again and again.”<\/p>\n

And yet, a year later, it seems to be largely forgotten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was, to my mind, arguably the single most hackish moment of John McCain’s career. Last April, desperate to convince Americans that he was right about Iraq, the senator toured Baghdad’s Shorja market, bragged about how safe it was, and touted his experience as proof that Americans were not getting the “full picture about what’s […]<\/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-14915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14915","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=14915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}