McCain, the Surge, the Awakening and CBS

Great Debates
1

Offered as topic of discussion and debate: What the Fuck Is Going On?

I refer you to this site: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/22/mccain-anbar-history/

Now, this is a decidedly lefty site, anti-cooty protocols as need be but: they have all the pertinent shit in one place, with appropriate links. I suppose I could click all those links and provide them directly with the relevant quotes, but who would I be kidding. Think Progress has it, and there must be two or three of us who check it out regularly enough.

For those who simply cannot accept the risk, in a nutshell: McCain supported his thesis of the Surge as Deus Ex Petreaus by claiming that the Anwar Awakening (the turning of Sunni tribes against AlQ) was a direct result of the surge. It was not, and there is documentation available to prove that.

He said so in an interview with Katie Couric but! the interview was edited to remove the whopper/blunder from the tape to be presented, and footage of a later statement substituted. (I don’t know if there is a word for such a state of uncertainty, when one doesn’t know if its a willful lie or sheer ignorance, there being no comfort in either…)

What were they thinking? What were they smoking? What they fuck were they trying to accomplish? Why did they directly and deliberately edit out an embarrassing truth? On whose orders, and to what end? I can think of about nine scenarios, just off the top, ranging from the alarming to the ludicrously inept. But none of them really coalesce, no convincing gestalt emerges.

Does Cheney have a mortgage on their gonads? Did they feel sorry for poor old John? Did they think it really didn’t matter if they told us the truth, or no? Did they really think they were gonna get away with it? Would Katie Couric have shut up about it, and taken one for the team? What team? The people who sign her checks or the country she lives in?

In the thundering name of Og, what the fuck is going on?

2

Much as I dislike McCain, IMHO it’s pretty difficult to get all the facts and timelines correct all the time on every possible interview subject. Especially as a nominee with 24/7 focus. It’s hard for me to get outraged by something that ends up on the cutting room floor from a talking head interview.

3

The simple answer is they would have appeared to be playing favorites if they had made a big deal out of a simple mistake. Just like how the media didn’t over-hype the nazi death camp obama’s grandfather helped liberate. Sometimes people just fuck up and get their facts mixed up.

4

Despite constant right-wing whining about the “liberal media”, their corporate masters generally want the Republicans to control the government. In this case, either the editors at CBS didn’t understand the timeline themselves and were unaware that McCain was full of it, or they simply didn’t want to make him look bad. Either way, they dropped the ball big time on this one.

McCain is becoming a caricature, looking and sounding more like Grandpa Simpson every day.

5

I see Mosier’s point on this one. Obama has also said this campaign shouldn’t be about gotcha moments. Each candidates going to say some stupid things and misstate some of the facts.

However, McCain seems to misremember some very important details (like the difference between Sunnis and Shiites). To me that’s more disturbing than a simple “brain fart”.

As far as CBS’s role, I don’t think a news organization should be required to show every second of a raw interview, but it was suggested in the link that they left in the question, and then spliced in McCain’s answer to an entirely different question. That doesn’t sit well with me. Is there any truth to that statement?

6

McCain is behind. Whoever is behind gets boosted up. CBS doesn’t want you tuning out before the end of the game. They benefit from a closer race.

7

There is a difference between getting family history in error, and getting the details of your main talking point: when, who and why the “Surge” occured.

McCain is claiming that Obama doesn’t know what he is talking about, yet McCain gets the information concerning the Surge wrong. That to me, is news worthy.

McCain is showing a pattern here of getting details wrong, repeatedly; as in saying the same thing over and over despite being told he was in error when he first said it.

That is different than misspeaking on occasion and I question if it wasn’t McCain, would he be getting a pass on this?

And if CBS did swap his answer for another as the transcript seems to suggest, then that should give every one pause, regardless of what your political stance is.

8

Yup. A couple of weeks ago, some major news orgs like The Washington Post (a paragon of “liberal media”) got busted for not reporting the latest polls showing Obama’s lead holding and instead having blurbs about McCain surging among (insert random demographic group here). They’re sounding like sportscasters in a blowout or something.

9

…the McCain campaign is now accusing Obama of supporting genocide:

Just when you think the nastiness can’t get any worse… I mean, seriously, just what the hell do they think they’re doing? Dear Og, the rank stench of desperation, spite and envy wafting out of that camp is enough to gag a maggot lately.

10

The problem with McCain’s flub on the Sunni Awakening is that he made his statement for the express purpose of attacking Obama’s grasp of the history. McCain himself made the issue into a big deal and then fucked it up in the process. If he’s going to use it as a weapon, then he should bear the wound it causes.

11

To repeat holmes, there is a big difference in your two examples. Obama named the wrong camp, maybe because everyone knows what Auschwitz means, maybe because the family lore got a bit muddled over the years (didn’t we do a thread on this back after the speech- the actual camp was a sub-camp of Auschwitz). McCain is showing ignorance or denial of the basic facts of the Iraq War, which is supposed to be his specialty. Personally, I think he’s got to convince people that the Surge is responsible for the Awakening, when it was the Surge of Cash, not soldiers, that has brought the Sunnis of Anbar into the fold.

12

There are different types of fact mixups.

Obama’s mixup was having the wrong death camp name, from a childhood memory. The fundamentals of the story don’t change significantly, the point of the story doesn’t change, just the name of the camp.

McCain has mixed up cause and effect. He’s saying that the Awakening is due to the Surge, and it is factually untrue. There is no fundamental truth to the story to fall back on, he didn’t mix up the Awakening with the “Rising”, or some other event that WAS caused by the Surge, he is just flat out wrong about what going on in Iraq at that time. It speaks to a lack of understanding about fundamental aspects of what is happening in Iraq, and why, not just a mixed up name.

13

Yes, neither an unthinking flub by a supposed expert, nor a calculated twisting of the timeline reflects well on him.

14

This guy’s whole campaign hinges on the idea that the surge is working and his better grasp of the facts on Iraq. This “gaffe” undermines both of these fundamental tenants of his campaign. He clearly is not as informed as he claims to be and the fact is that the surge did not start the turnaround in sectarian violence in Iraq.

This is not even close to Obama’s minor Auschwiz blunder, this speaks directly to McCain’s whole campaign.

15

From the supply side of these misstatements, I think there’s something to the idea that it’s ingrained in McCain that, in an interview or to a town hall, he can say anything he finds politically expedient. He can’t really wrap his mind around the new portability of information- that what he says is instantaneously everywhere and it never decays.

These are not misspeaks, they are political gambits from a man who is not used to a public that has the ability to know better. Maybe he is right, and they don’t, and it will pay off for him. But it’s going to get worse before it gets better and you have to wonder how long he’ll be given a pass on this by the respectable media.

16

In case anyone is interested, here’s both versions:McCainSpeaks

17

Am I missing something that no one seems to be bothered by this:

Maybe I am misreading that but it looks like CBS is manipulating the news. They posted a different response to the question they asked!

Isn’t that against the law? Or can media just mix and match questions and answers as they please?

It also certainly makes it look like a deliberate action rather than a goof and the only reasoning for that I can see is an attempt to shield McCain from himself.

18

I just have a sneaking suspicion that the answer to a different question thing happens all the time, even in mainstream media interviews. I absolutely hate that, but we know it has even happened that sometimes the person doing the interviewing in reality wasn’t even the person who was doing it when we were seeing it.

You know, most of the flubs or gaffes we’ve seen, both McCain’s and Obama’s, have been what I’d call the oral equivalen of typos, up to and including Czechoslovakia and Auschwitz (not to mention "Israel is the best friend of Israel, which could be, as pointed out by Richard Lewis, a recognition of Israel’s supreme self-confidence). But two things have been substantive enough to disturb me. One has been this last night, the other has been the claim (quickly corrected by former Democrat Joe Lieberman) that Al Qaida had been operating out of Iran. Those don’t strike me as mere slips of the tongue. They strike me as actual misunderstandings or lack of understanding. They might have been forgiveable in just anyone, but in someone who is trying to bill himself as the Great Foreign Relations and Military Guy[sup]TM[/sup]?

19

Especially when he intended it to harm his opponent. He intended to convey Obama’s misunderstanding of a fact of history that McCain himself got wrong. That’s not a mishap. That’s slapping his own face and going, “Take that!”

It has gotten to the point that I simply cannot respect anyone who supports him. He is clearly an idiot who will tell any lie and violate any principle for a moment of political gain. If he were to win and run the country the way he runs his campaign, it would be an absolutely disasterous time for the US, making Bush seem like a great leader by comparison.

He says, “I know how to win wars.” Really? What war has he won? He says, “Obama wants to lose a war to win a campaign.” Jesus. Why not just call Obama a seditious traitor? He says, “Obama has no military experience.” So what. Does McCain think Commander in Chief is a military rank?

We’re talking about a doddering old fool who shuffles around on the stage flashing a shit-eating grin while he embarrasses himself and America with his reckless stupidity. He relies on crooks and liars for advice. He is losing his mental faculties at an alarming rate. He doesn’t even have the energy to campaign on weekends. It is just impossible, for me, to respect anyone who thinks he should be our president. There has never been a more clear cut difference between the candidates.

20

Yes, this is what gets me. Very little to do with McCain and his ever-increasing list of flubs.

At the very least, I expect that a news program will present a question followed by the actual answer given, not a slice and dice edit job.