McCain taking the lower road thus far

Anyone remember when McCain pledged to run a clean campaign? To refresh, he vowed in a very public way, on national TV, to run "an honorable and dignified campaign" against Barack Obama. I distinctly remember McCain (and his wife) saying that if any mudslinging were to happen during this campaign, it would come "from the other side." The problem with a promise like that is, what's "honorable and dignified" and "mudslinging" to one person, is perfectly acceptable to another in a political campaign. For example, Karl Rove's definition of what's underhanded in a political campaign would differ from just about any reasonable human being's definition of what that is. (Rove is an unacknowledged consultant to the McCain campaign.)

Anyway, so much for McCain's "clean campaign." Really, McCain broke that promise a long time ago, but lately, he's taken the witticisms to a whole new level, and by that I mean lower level. McCain's latest undignified remarks are regarding his consistent questioning of Barack Obama's commitment to the troops and to victory in Iraq.

First off, as I wrote yesterday, no one has adequately explained just what victory in Iraq is. (Tell me this isn't Vietnam all over again - first LBJ, and then Nixon, both refused to pull out because they didn't want to go down in history as "the first president to lose a war." [Nixon was quoted as much on his tapes.])

I love how McCain in the footage above explicitly states that he's "not questioning his [Obama's] patriotism," yet he then basically questions his patriotism, and as George Stephanopoulos says, Obama's "honor," too.

That's a page right out of Karl Rove's playbook - Bush and Cheney have been doing it for years. Think back to the run-up to the War in Iraq, when they both would say that Iraq "had nothing to do with 9-11," then in the next sentence talk about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Actually, early on, Cheney even went further than that, saying that members of the Iraqi government met with hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague, when the intelligence clearly determined that the meeting had not taken place (this from George Tenet's book).

Hearing an arrogant McCain dismissively sniff that Barack Obama "doesn't understained" [spelling intentional] about Iraq makes me laugh. McCain's comments in recent weeks clearly demonstrate that he lacks plenty of understanding himself when it comes to foreign affairs, including what's going on in Iran and Iraq. The incident last week where CBS spliced his comments together to blatantly omit a whopper of an error is just one of those examples. And I don't buy into the media's explanation that they are "gaffes," either. A gaffe happens when someone makes a mistake, forgets a name, or pronounces something wrong, or forgets a date, but the implication is that people who commit gaffes actually know the facts.

McCain doesn't. When he gets on TV and says arrogantly and dismissively that "it's a matter of history" that the Troop Surge in Iraq (which began in January 2007) was responsible for the Anbar Awakening, which began three months earlier, it's a clear demonstration that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. There's no other plausible explanation, other than that his mind is going, circa Ronald Reagan in his second term.

Chuck Hagel was absolutely right when he took umbrage with McCain on yesterday's Face the Nation, too, when he says that McCain is on "very thin ground," by asserting that Obama would rather "lose a war to win a campaign."

McCain's comments about Obama in the footage above are probably among the most disgraceful I've heard a presidential candidate say about his opponent in my adult life. If there's a worse example of a presidential candidate saying something about his opponent in the last 25 years, I certainly can't think of it.

Also interesting to hear Faux News taking the predictable line courtesy of its GOP sponsors, specifically Chris Wallace echoing the GOP talking point that Obama could have gone to see the troops "without campaign staff" as the Pentagon directed. Hmm, who runs the Pentagon again? It's not a stretch to say that this was an attempt to blatantly embarrass Obama. Should he have gone anyway? Sure, but I'm guessing there's a lot more to this story than McCain's campaign ad is telling us.

And more to the point, I guess it was okay for John McCain to stroll down the street in a Baghdad Market last summer, flanked by dozens and dozens of U.S. troops and helicopters, in what amounted to a campaign appearance, but when Obama wants to do something similar, it's the world's biggest sin, right? Hmm, let's re-examine - McCain, as a declared presidential candidate, pulls scads of troops away from their real jobs so he can stroll down the street in Baghdad, and President Bush lands on an aircraft carrier to laughingly declare Mission Accomplished (when it wasn't), and Obama is politicizing our troops? Uh, sure.

This whole "visiting the troops" pseudo-scandal is being cooked up by Fox News, McCain and the likes of Matt Drudge to try and smear Obama after a very successful trip overseas, and in the end, it shouldn't amount to much. If it does, than this country is in even deeper trouble than I thought.

Sen. Claire McCaskill was spot on when she said that Republicans could criticize just about anything Obama said, i.e. - he took heat for not going to Iraq, then he took heat for going to Iraq, etc. Gimme a break. It's another attempt by the right to blunt Obama's surging popularity.