Every time the man opens his mouth I am grateful that voters were smart enough to vote for Barack Obama in 2008.
This morning, McCain appeared on msnbc to once again blame the United States for deteriorating conditions in Iraq. He insisted, “The fact is, we had the conflict won. The surge had succeeded. And then, the decision was made by the Obama administration to not have a residual force in Iraq.”
When Sam Stein pressed the senator on his definition of “victory,” the senator responded, “I’m sorry about your confusion, but anyone who was there can tell you we had the conflict won.”
If we’d already won the war, why does McCain believe we needed to keep U.S. military forces fighting in Iraq indefinitely? He didn’t say. If withdrawing was a mistake, why didn’t McCain condemn Bush/Cheney for signing the Status of Forces Agreement in 2008? He didn’t say. If Iraq didn’t want a residual force in Iraq, how were we supposed to override the decision? He didn’t say.
McCain also took the opportunity to urge President Obama to fire his entire national security team. (Yes, the man who believed Sarah Palin should be one heartbeat from the presidency is now comfortable giving others personnel advice.)
The voters in Arizona should gently retire this guy in 2016; he’s losing his grip on reality. He seems to think he’s the rightful President of the United States and that the principal job the President has is to fight wars with people.
This is way too close to my recent reading. I just finished Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser. This is a terrifyingly complete list of all the accidents that happened around nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project through the Gorbachev negotiations – I finished the chapters on the ’60s wondering how the hell did we get through that without exploding a nuke? And we never, of course, heard of any of this. In fact, I still wonder how the hell we got through all that (not that we’re done, they’re still there) without any nuclear explosions except Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The section on the ’60s has a lot about the mental set in SAC at the time. McCain sounds exactly like them. And the caricature of Curtis LeMay in Doctor Strangelove, which I always thought was overdone, now makes perfect sense… I may yet blog this.