Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

The willow is too close to the house.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, it’s door #2)

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it’s a trap.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

When we show up, we win.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

This fight is for everything.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

You are here: Home / Politics / Media / More On John “Foreign Policy” McCain

More On John “Foreign Policy” McCain

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Nobody who pays the faintest attention thinks that Shiite Iran has or wants anything to do with the Sunni radicals in al Qaeda. For one thing bin Laden’s Iraq branch spends more energy slaughtering Shiites than it does attacking us. Sounds like a great program for Shiite Ayatollah Khamenei to promote, doesn’t it? Yeesh. Thinking that the two have some mutually supportive relationship is like proving your baseball knowledge by arguing that the Dolphins should start David Beckham. It makes a person hard to take seriously.

John McCain says crap like this every day. Joe Lieberman corrects him (twice) and McCain keeps saying it anyway. By any reasonable measure McCain’s crayon-book understanding of the mideast ought to be his candidacy’s most prominent weakness, a shameful sore point that he avoids talking about at all costs; his Chalabi if you will. Yet through some weird oversight that hasn’t happened.

Maybe the media has leaned to expect the GOP to field drooling morons. In fairness it has become about as unusual as spring robin poop on curb-parked cars. Nonetheless one can only look at a case like this, when young men doddering old cranks are being failed by a system that refuses to hold them accountable, and shake one’s head at the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Reader Interactions

39Comments

  1. 1.

    cleek

    my theory is that McCain knows he’s saying inaccurate things, but does it anyway because he’s trying to whip the GOP mouthbreathers into a new war-frenzy.

  2. 2.

    JR

    Whoever knew the media would become the biggest problem of the Free World. There is apparently nothing that money, status and power cannot utterly corrupt.

    Actual journalists are rounded up and jailed in Iraq – it has become clear that a “journalist” poser who advocates the positions of the Establishment is the most dangerous actor of modern time. Propaganda is insidious and pervasive. And most of America hasn’t really caught on even yet.

  3. 3.

    Dennis - SGMM

    Make fun of McCain at your peril! There are many of us who believe that his support of the Designated Hitter in football shows that he has crossed the Commander in Chief threshold.

  4. 4.

    Zifnab

    Yet somehow John McCain says crap like this every day. Joe Lieberman corrects him (twice) and McCain keeps saying it anyway. By any reasonable measure McCain’s crayon-book understanding of the mideast ought to be his candidacy’s most prominent weakness, a shameful sore point that he avoids talking about at all costs; his Chalabi if you will. Yet through some weird oversight that hasn’t happened.

    It’s pretty generous if you to consider this a mistake in the classic sense of the term. You’re making the observation that McCain has stated a factual error and assuming that he simply wrong and not also deliberately lying. Yet in this same week, Dick Cheney went on a little trip to Iraq and couldn’t help but point out how Iraq was linked to 9/11.

    In Baghdad , a long-anticipated Iraqi national reconciliation conference began with great fanfare, then quickly dissolved into the usual sectarian and political stalemates that have marred several similar gatherings in recent years.

    But Vice President Dick Cheney gave an upbeat view of conditions in Iraq as he concluded his unannounced trip to mark the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion. Cheney also defended the toppling of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as part of the struggle against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    This month, an exhaustive Pentagon-sponsored review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents captured during the 2003 US invasion found no evidence that Saddam’s regime had any operational links with the al Qaida terrorist network.

    But Cheney, who spent the night at a sprawling US base in the northern town of Balad, told soldiers they were defending future generations of Americans from a global terror threat.

    “This long-term struggle became urgent on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 . That day we clearly saw that dangers can gather far from our own shores and find us right there at home,” said Cheney, who was accompanied by his wife, Lynne, and their daughter, Elizabeth.

    “So the United States made a decision: to hunt down the evil of terrorism and kill it where it grows, to hold the supporters of terror to account and to confront regimes that harbor terrorists and threaten the peace,” Cheney said. “Understanding all the dangers of this new era, we have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country of 170,000 square miles to become a staging area for further attacks against Americans.”

    Then follow that whooper up with the claim that Iran is back to building THE BOMB.

    Retaining his tough stance against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that Tehran may have restarted the nuclear weaponization program that a U.S. intelligence report said was halted in 2003.

    At what point does “told soldiers they were defending future generations of Americans from a global terror threat” and “Retaining his tough stance against Iran” officially get reported as “Once again attempted to bullshit our men in uniform and the public at large”?

  5. 5.

    cleek

    There are many of us who believe that his support of the Designated Hitter in football shows that he has crossed the Commander in Chief threshold.

    groan.. it took me three tries to realize you didn’t write:

    There are many of us who believe that his support of the Designated Hitler shows that he has crossed the Commander in Chief threshold.

    who is the Designated Hitler ?

    maybe it’s time to close FireFox and take a break from political blogs.

  6. 6.

    Davis X. Machina

    McCain’s crayon-book understanding of the mideast ought to be his candidacy’s most prominent weakness…

    Feature, not a bug.

    It’s:

    “clarity” , “focus”, “moral certainty”, “decisiveness”.

    This country loves Strong and Wrong, witness the apotheosis of Reagan.

  7. 7.

    jon

    I really, really hope McCain didn’t actually suggest that Purim is a kind of Halloween. That would only make sense if he visited Israel in the past and saw lots of Israeli women in costumes such as sexy nurse, whip-toting dominatrix, island castaway, or all the other things women dress up in for Halloween or the cathouse costume party or whatever it is that exposed him to Jewish culture. Were there tricks involved?

    Maybe someone at the State Department could look into this for us.

  8. 8.

    eric

    Joe Lieberman is a perfect flunky, there to correct John McCain’s mistakes. blow his nose, help him with his medicines, and change his depends diapers.

  9. 9.

    calipygian

    Stupid Tim F. We create our own reality.

    The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    Sigh. I can’t believe how many times I have to point this out.

  10. 10.

    Dennis - SGMM

    who is the Designated Hitler ?

    maybe it’s time to close FireFox and take a break from political blogs.

    Your confusion is understandable. The “Designated Hitler” was a position that the German-American Bund lobbied certain college teams to adopt in 1937. And, now that I read this post, I’m beginning to wonder if shouldn’t sit out this, my last political blog, for a while.

    Aw, what the hell…

  11. 11.

    Jake

    24 Hour Wrong worked for Bush. All McCane needs is a copy of My Pet Goat to remind Muricuns how safe they felt when, upon hearing our country was under attack, the president had a seven minute flashback.

  13. 13.

    The Other Steve

    Over at TPM someone commented that McCain operates like a fighter pilot. He understands tactics, he’s two steps ahead trying to get a lock and shoot the plane down.

    However, he doesn’t see strategy. He doesn’t know why he’s trying to shoot the other plane down, or how many other planes they have up in the sky, or even if they are winning the larger battle.

  15. 15.

    David Hunt

    Personally, I like using an analogy that’s a little closer to the original context but still close to home. In other words, even though I got the Dolphins comment, sports analogies tend to be lost on me. So here’s my entry: Saying that Iran is training al Qaeda fighters is like asserting that the Black Panthers are sending members to Mississippi to train in terror tactics with the KKK in their mutual war on the lawful authority in the U.S. That’s the how wrong/deceitful John McCain is. Anyone who would say stuff that far off needs to be lowered from the status of Foreign Policy Expert to (Poorly) Trained Monkey. Sometimes I want to weep for my country.

  17. 17.

    ThymeZone

    I think you should go with your instincts. Does McCain act like a confused guy who doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about?

    Well, there you are. He is. He’s been in steady decline for several years now, he is now basically a POW version of Charlton Heston.

    What’s really shocking is not so much that people outside of Arizona are just twigging to this, it’s that we have Dems — or supposed Dems — sitting here on this blog and crapping their pants because they think that Barack Obama might lose this dottering idiot. This catastrophe of a candidate who is despised by half of his own party.

    These really are fascinating times.

  19. 19.

    Svensker

    But the word in Right-o-stan is that Al Qaeda IS being helped by Iran. Last night I heard Mort Kondrake say so, in fact, he said “there is absolutely no doubt that Iran is helping Al Qaeda and anyone who doesn’t think so is fooling themselves.” These boys want to go to war with Iran. They believe anyone who is agin ’em helps Al Qaeda, Iran is agin ’em, therefore…

    Whether John McCain is a willing tool, a clueless tool, or just uneducated, should be the question.

    Sadly, it’s a question we won’t be hearing from our “liberal” MSM.

  20. 20.

    TenguPhule

    Did you call McCain a moron?

    That is an insult to perfectly respectable morons. Some of whom haunt this blog.

  21. 21.

    ThymeZone

    Sadly, it’s a question we won’t be hearing from our “liberal” MSM.

    I think you will. I forsee a debate in October where foreign policy is the main topic. I see a well prepared and eloquent Barack Obama against a confused and blustery John McCain, and Obama just wiping the floor with him, and then you will hear the questions raised, and this contest will be over. If it hadn’t already been over.

  22. 22.

    4tehlulz

    Whether John McCain is a willing tool, a clueless tool, or just uneducated, should be the question.

    Will you accept, “He’s a tool.”, as the correct answer?

  23. 23.

    scarshapedstar

    Just out of curiosity, has there ever been any proof that “Al Qaeda”, you know, actually exists? In the sense of the James Bond SPECTRE-style ‘nefarious international shadow army with thousands of footsoldiers’ that we were led to believe? I’ve never seen any.

    Let’s see. We’ve got “9/11 9/11 9/11”, okay, okay, but several of the supposed hijackers are still alive, so for all we know they just picked 4 or 5 arabs on every flight to blame. And then…

    …well, that’s pretty much it. Based on the “evidence” that the hijackers were arabs or muslims or something, as well as a video of “Osama” claiming responsibility, we invaded Afghanistan, where we’ve found (surprise!) absolutely zero “Al Qaeda operatives”, most likely because “Al Qaeda” (a name invented by us, appropriately enough) was more like two guys with a large bank account. Nevertheless, this was enough fun for us to invade Iraq, where we’ve found… well, okay, Al Qaeda isn’t Iraq, either.

    So, wonders of wonders, we took the Orwellian tactic of labeling some squabbling Sunni Iraqi militias “Al Qaeda in Iraq”. And apparently that’s all it takes to support a Serious foreign policy!

  24. 24.

    Fledermaus

    But the word in Right-o-stan is that Al Qaeda IS being helped by Iran. Last night I heard Mort Kondrake say so, in fact, he said “there is absolutely no doubt that Iran is helping Al Qaeda and anyone who doesn’t think so is fooling themselves.”

    Yep. The right just makes shit up that sounds good and has a bunch of willing accomplices repeat it endlessly. Americans have been inundated with tons of information some true but mostly false have given no way to evaluate it, because such “experts” as Krauthammer or think tank flunkies all validate the bullshit. So your average american has a whole buffet of truths to choose from and experts to cite – they will naturally pick the most appealing one.

    Will the illusions and bullshit be impossible to maintain in the general? I can’t say, but the urge to believe a bunch of happy stories about “how successful the war is and on to Iran who are killing our boys in Iraq!” will be quite strong. It has the advantage of flattering us on all the good that we’re doing in Iraq and justifying the punishment a bunch of Iranians who say mean things about Americans – how dare they! As Adam Smith wrote, per Greenwald:

    In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.

  25. 25.

    rawshark

    TenguPhule Says:

    Did you call McCain a moron?

    That is an insult to perfectly respectable morons. Some of whom haunt this blog.

    Maybe I just read the title wrong.

    What’s really shocking is not so much that people outside of Arizona are just twigging to this,

    I’m twigging
    into a whole new era
    G-Funk step to this
    I dare ya

    Sorry about that. But it ain’t often someone drops ‘twigging’ into a discussion. I hear that word and Warren G starts playing in my head. Now its in yours too.

  26. 26.

    Tsulagi

    McCain keeps saying it anyway.

    Why not? Worked once repeating 9/11-Iraq! 9/11-Iraq! 9/11-Iraq! a few thousand times. Build the narrative and the tards will come. McCain is just keeping it simple for the stupids.

    his Chalabi if you will

    Hey, don’t rag on our man, Chalabi! He’s a vital part of the The Surge success…

    Earlier this month, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki named Chalabi as head of the services committee, a consortium of eight service ministries and two Baghdad municipal posts, that is tasked with bringing services to Baghdad, the heart of the surge plan.

    Chalabi “is an important part of the process,” said Col. Steven Boylan, Petraeus’ spokesman. “He has a lot of energy.”

    Swear to God, you could drop a nuke on that fucker and like a cockroach he’d survive. Just glow a little, burp, then go infest something else.

  27. 27.

    Jeremy C.

    Wait, I don’t get the irony?

    Beckham could really help the Dolphins out next season! Who says the Big Tuna isn’t recruiting him now?

    I think he could be quite successful at starting Kicker AND back-up QB!

    Skinny-Spice would have a BLAST in Miami South Beach.

  28. 28.

    Zifnab

    Over at TPM someone commented that McCain operates like a fighter pilot. He understands tactics, he’s two steps ahead trying to get a lock and shoot the plane down.

    Wait, so how does that explain his stay at the Hanoi Hilton?

  29. 29.

    Gus

    scarshapedstar, I’ve often wondered the same thing. Soon after 9/11 I remember hearing or reading someone who knows about the Middle East scoffing at the notion of a cohesive organization called al Qaeda.

  30. 30.

    EnderWiggin

    my theory is that McCain knows he’s saying inaccurate things, but does it anyway because he’s trying to whip the GOP mouthbreathers into a new war-frenzy.

    My thought exactly when he said it. He is stupid, but in order to get the freeper crowd excited, he needs to make it clear that all muslim people are the enemy. These people don’t know what al Qaeda is specifically. They just know they are brown, muslim and out to kill us. In freeper world, a leader is a person who understands ‘one big thing’.

  31. 31.

    srv

    Wait, so how does that explain his stay at the Hanoi Hilton?

    The people on the receiving end ran out of flowers to throw and started using something bigger. Ingrates.

    From 30,000′, you have zero understanding of the ground truth. Re our current leader.

  32. 32.

    Dennis - SGMM

    Over at TPM someone commented that McCain operates like a fighter pilot. He understands tactics, he’s two steps ahead trying to get a lock and shoot the plane down.

    McCain flew attack aircraft. As some doctors believe that any medical problem can be solved by prescribing the right pill, McCain believes that any world problem can be solved by the delivery of the right ordnance.

  33. 33.

    Hoobert Heever

    You’re absolutely right, Tim, the acceptable standard for a republican in our political/media culture is for s/he to be greedy, corrupt, ignorant, and lizard-brained. On the Democratic side, the standard is someone a hair short of the second coming of Jeebus Cripes. That’s the way it is.

  34. 34.

    gypsy howell

    I see a well prepared and eloquent Barack Obama against a confused and blustery John McCain, and Obama just wiping the floor with him, and then you will hear the questions raised, and this contest will be over.

    I dunno, TZ. We saw that happen in 2000, and got Bush. We saw it happen again in 2004 and got … Bush again.

    Never underestimate the mendacity of the press and the stupidity of the American people.

  35. 35.

    Hoobert Heever

    I just think of it as Obama vs. John (George Bush) McCain. I don’t think that even the mendacity of the press and the stupidity of the American people can help McClueless/Bush here.

  36. 36.

    racrecir

    It would be irresponsible not to speculate that McCain was suffering early stage Alzheimer’s.

  37. 37.

    Brachiator

    Yet somehow John McCain says crap like this every day. Joe Lieberman corrects him (twice) and McCain keeps saying it anyway. By any reasonable measure McCain’s crayon-book understanding of the mideast ought to be his candidacy’s most prominent weakness, a shameful sore point that he avoids talking about at all costs; his Chalabi if you will. Yet through some weird oversight that hasn’t happened.

    Let’s see. McCain doesn’t know anything about foreign policy, doesn’t know anything about the economy. Yep. He has definitely crossed the presidential threshold.

    I really, really hope McCain didn’t actually suggest that Purim is a kind of Halloween. That would only make sense if he visited Israel in the past and saw lots of Israeli women in costumes such as sexy nurse, whip-toting dominatrix, island castaway, or all the other things women dress up in for Halloween or the cathouse costume party or whatever it is that exposed him to Jewish culture. Were there tricks involved?

    There is some evidence that Purim is a sanitized version of a pagan fertility festival, and here comparing it to a sexy Halloween is not entirely inappropriate (PURIM IN THE BEGINNING . . .):

    On one level, the Purim story represents the annual struggle to end the harsh reign of winter. The original characters appear to have been Babylonian gods: Ishtar, the goddess of fertility; Marduk, the chief guardian of the heavens; and Haman, the underworld devil. Ishtar and Haman, life and death, vie with each other for supremacy. Ishtar triumphs; spring returns; and life is renewed. Yahveh, the Hebrew God, played no part in the celebration, which was filled with theatrical renditions of the contest. Noisemaking and masquerading were necessary to trick the evil gods and to aid the good ones. Sexual orgies promoted fertility. Merriment was the order of the day.

    Scholars have had an interesting time explaining why the deity is never mentioned in the Book of Esther (which is one of the sources for Purim), or why the names of the main characters are very, very close to the names of Babylonian deities, avoiding the obvious connections with fertility cults.

  39. 39.

    Perry Como

    That would only make sense if he visited Israel in the past and saw lots of Israeli women in costumes such as sexy nurse, whip-toting dominatrix, island castaway, or all the other things women dress up in for Halloween or the cathouse costume party or whatever it is that exposed him to Jewish culture.

    DO WANT

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