McCain is always bragging that supporting the surge could have cost him the election...

[Wetzelbill]

He makes it sound like by making an unpopular, but right, choice he held up his honor in the face of politics.

Yeah right. When has the Republican Party ever voted for a dove instead of a warmonger? McCain probably won that nomination because he was the biggest hawk there is. And even then Americans will tend to be against a war and vote for the most hawkish sounding guy in the room. Nixon won two elections at the height of an unpopular war, partly because he was able to assert that by being hawkish he could bring peace. Four years ago, Bush ran on the idea that he was the guy who could "win" Iraq and eventually bring peace. They do it with fear and with bluster. And McCain's running on that blueprint.

McCain knew that in the end, he can outhawk everybody else and that his media buddies will frame everything his way. So yeah, it may have been unpopular to support the surge, but it was also the only political path he could take. If he advocated a withdrawal and pull out right then, he wouldn't have won a primary. And look at it now, McCain can crow about the success of the surge, when it didn't do what the whole idea of the surge was supposed to do, and that's create political reconciliation in Iraq. He even tried to hedge his bets before the surge by acting like he thought it was a mistake to put Casey in charge of the region, when he didn't agree with the strategy. He was setting it up to have it both ways before the strategy came into effect.

But that guy, you knew his integrity when he did that photo op Baghdad Market stroll and tried to paint Iraq as something that it wasn't for purely political purposes. McCain is as craven a liar as they come, so you can guarantee he'll keep selling the idea that he made some kind of great political sacrifice in order to win a way. Ok, John. Whatever.

[opihimoimoi]

1. K&R.....Successful Surge? 57 peeps died today....its not over.....

They can come anytime....and they do....tis not over....

[Wetzelbill]

4. oh yeah

And it's important to understand how the Sadr ceasefire and the Sunni Awakening, plus the basic ethnic cleansing of the most dangerous areas have limited violence too. The Surge is something that could make a difference, adding troops was going to stop violence to an extent, that's Military History 101 there, obvious stuff. But that was never the issue, the political reconciliation is the issue and that hasn't gotten any closer. Yeah some people can point to certain things, sure, but, in reality, we aren't a day closer to reconciliation than we were nearly two years ago. And that's what the surge was all about, not just quelling violence, if anything the Shia ceasefire and the Sunni Awakening were more important to that, that's certainly the case in Anbar. From that standpoint, the real progress, the surge has done NOTHING. And that's not the troops fault either.

This whole thing has been a disaster. We invaded Iraq to create a Middle East with a stronger Iran who now has a near proxy state in Iraq. When the Iraq security forces fought with Sadr earlier this year, Sadr was walloping them until the General of the Quds forces got them all together and brokered a peace agreement in Iran. If you recall the Quds forces are the elite group within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, something McCain voted for and supported, made a terrorist organization. There is something to be said when Ahmadenijad and the Iraninan Mullahs are more capable of brokering a peaceful settlement in Iraq than the Bush administration. McCain, of course, lacks fundamental understanding of all of this.

[babylonsister]

2. McCrabby is hanging on by the skin of his yellow teeth, but

he's full of shit. The media is allowing him to do this. He's inept, incompetent, his memory is shot, and he's an embarrassment to the rethugs.
Now, if only the 'media' would report how horrible he is. He is; makes me wonder why the media is so intent on making this country worse contributing by aiding in the lie.

[Wetzelbill]

3. part of it is they definitely have to make it seem like a close race

Otherwise it's bad for business. They also like the guy and protect him from himself alot. Of course you know that. But I also think that they are just all status quo indoctrined. They think all along certain lines. One side vs the other side. And things have come to be framed always from the Right's perspective now, on taxes, on war etc. That's what the status quo is, and to them it's impolite to call a spade a spade. Sure, Bush might have seemed like a dipshit but it wasn't there place to call him on it, that wouldn't be "objective." But when Al Gore made a gaffe, well it was fair to go after the gaffe, because you were attacking that instance and not just the man and his policies. Even if the gaffe was a fake one, like the "inventing the internet" thing. Now they are doing it with McCain.

See it's fair for them to play Jeremiah Wright or critique Obama's comment on "clinging to guns etc" but it's not fair and objective to say that McCain's tax plan amounts to a impossible fantasy. Why? Because that is taking one side's policies over the other. But what is messed up is, that conventional wisdom tells these guys that "tax cuts work" so that's why you got the Charlie Gibson questions in that awful ABC debate with Hillary and Barack, because he couldn't get it out of his head that maybe if you taxed the richest among us, it wouldn't actually create revenue. Or that that revenue wouldn't come from the people who could most afford to create revenue, in some shape or form.

It's also fair to question Obama's patriotism, because that's become an accepted Right-Wing framing tactic, but it isn't fair to question John McCain's mental condition when he sings "Bomb Iran" and all these other gaffes, nor is it fair to critique his voting record on military issues, because he is a POW and a hero for it. If you noticed how Bob Schieffer was incredulous when Wes Clark said that getting shot down and being a POW doesn't necessarily make somebody a national security expert, it's like it never occurred to Bob that McCain, the decorated POW, might not actually know anything about national security. The status quo frames it all in a RW manner. I don't know, maybe they are so tired of being accused of having a "Liberal bias" that they automatically frame from the Right all the time now. It's not a good thing, that's for sure.