As the week draws towards a close, I would just like to take a quick moment to congratulate John McCain and the Republican Party for doing everything they could this week to focus the public's attention on the Iraq War. I think they are doing wonderfully, and will no doubt win in November if they simply keep doing what they are doing. We are very frightened of this new strategy, which is very clever and working out perfectly.
Let's run down the stories just from the last few days, shall we?
McCain used a picture of himself with a uniformed Gen. David Petraeus in a fundraising drive -- a rather gauche move, and a strict no-no -- and had to apologize for it.
McCain launched a very odd and desperate-sounding initiative to try to somehow goad Obama into visiting Iraq with him as a sort of campaign field trip. But McCain's previous field trips to Iraq have badly damaged what little credibility he has on the subject, so it's not really a good topic for him to begin with. And when McCain, the RNC, and supposedly unaffiliated 527 groups all jumped aboard with the same message and suspiciously near-identical phrasing, it only served to draw attention to the McCain campaign's history of lobbyist and 527 ties -- and possibly illegal coordination between the campaign and outside groups.
Despite his constant assertions of his military expertise, when speaking this week McCain once again proved ignorant of the most basic facts of the war he so avidly supports. He said that we have "drawn down to pre-surge levels": we most pointedly have not, causing the McCain campaign to angrily talk about "nitpicking" the difference between "verb tenses" -- like, say, past, present, future, and imaginary pluperfect. Because McCain wasn't badly misinformed, they assert, he was just talking about the future as if it were the present, or something.
He also claimed places like Mosul are "quiet" -- wrong. The latest suicide bombing was a mere day beforehand.
So when McCain said, in the same breath as those two fabrications that the Iraq War is "succeeding", it only called more attention to the bizarre and misinformed assertions he was using to justify that claim.
To top it all off, he even got dragged into the McClellan story of pro-war administration propaganda efforts. That's an extra-special jackpot edition of Iraq Propaganda Theater, right there.
So please, Republican Party. Please keep talking about Iraq. With every waking breath, if you can manage it. Please fill the pages of our site with your assertions about the Iraq War, and your demands that the nation continue the Iraq War, and most of all your candidate's increasingly imaginary assertions about the basic facts of the Iraq War.
I'm sure it will work out to your favor, and gain you lots and lots of votes come November. Carry on.