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.<\/p>\n
The topic, of course, was Iraq. To his credit, Russert was asking the right questions, reminding McCain of his now-embarrassing comments<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n That’s<\/i> the message McCain is prepared to take to the voters in 2008? Everything after May 2003 doesn’t count?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I’ll update this post the moment I can track down the transcript and\/or the video, but this is what he said.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n MCCAIN: It was.<\/p>\n RUSSERT: In all honesty\u2026<\/p>\n MCCAIN: It was easy, it was easy. I said the military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeted as liberators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The poor guy has clearly lost it. This is almost a Bush-like level of denial.<\/p>\n TP has the video clip<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, via Anne in comments<\/a>, MSNBC has an even longer excerpt<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577","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=9577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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