Either the mendacious master of "straight talk" is a moron or a senile boob. His lack of command of what he claims to be his signature issue — experience in foreign affairs/ military — is such a blatant falsehood that it begs the question: is John McCain dumber than average student George W. Bush?
Bush never claimed to be any kind of policy wonk. He never claimed to be particularly curious about other countries as his lack of travel abroad proves. Therefore it was not surprising that he "failed" Boston television reporter Andy Hiller's pop quiz in 2000.
The complete bias of the MSM to soft pedal every McCain error as a "gaffe" or "senior moment" suggests complicity on the part of the Fourth Estate. While our personality-driven political discourse clearly favored George Bush over Al Gore and John Kerry, the MSM isn't even holding McCain to the paltry standards that it applied to Bush.
It is true that it was particularly surprising that the son of the former UN Ambassador, CIA Director, and President would appear so disinterested in foreign affairs, but Bush never claimed more than a cursory knowledge of the subject matter.
On the other hand, McCain comes from a family that produced two admirals and he has always claimed to be an expert in all things military and foreign. However, when GOP operatives talk off the record of McCain's rambling answers and lack of expertise, they are implicitly acknowledging that the senior senator from Arizona is a blowhard who can hardly tell the difference between sh-t and Shinola — or in McCain's case, Sunni and Shia.
McCain has chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, but he doesn't seem to know the chain of command in the military. He insists that any decision to remove troops from Iraq and redeploy them in Afghanistan would be up to General Petraeus. That would be news to Petraeus and his superiors because that is not his decision to make in the first place.
Like Bush, McCain appears to have learned nothing from history. That in itself is particularly disturbing, but even more so considering McCain's personal history. Most combat veterans, especially those in the Army, are extremely reluctant to ever use force except when necessary. Hence the Powell Doctrine.
The "Powell Doctrine", named after General Colin Powell in the run-up to the 1990-1991 Gulf War, states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States. They are:
Is a vital national security interest threatened?
Do we have a clear attainable objective?
Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
Is the action supported by the American people?
Do we have genuine broad international support?
Ironically, the final point of the Doctrine is normally interpreted to mean that the U.S. should not get involved in peacekeeping or nation-building exercises. This was reenforced by then Governor Bush during the 2000 election campaign.
"Let me tell you what else I'm worried about: I'm worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place."
The line was an explicit condemnation of Clinton/Gore foreign policy--specifically that the White House had stretched the military too thin with peacekeeping mission in Haiti, Somalia and the Balkans. President Clinton and Vice President Gore, his Democratic opponent, had strayed from the central mission of the military: to fight and win wars, Bush said.
According to Washington Post reporter Terry M. Neal , that line proved to be among the most popular in the stump speech, guaranteed to evoke an eruption of applause from the conservatives who packed Bush's campaign rallies.
Of course, the Bush Administration ignored the entire Powell Doctrine, much to the chagrin of Powell and others such as General Eric Shinsecki. The most salient point that was ignored concerned using every resource and tool to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate. This is well in line with Western military strategy dating at least from Carl von Clausewitz's On War.
McCain was for the war before he was against it and before he was for it again. Like Dick Cheney, he claimed we would be greeted as liberators. Realitycheck08.org has the straight dope:
He told then Today Show host Katie Couric on March 20, 2003, “But I believe, Katie, that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.” Earlier that month on March 7th, he told ABC’s This Week, “I’m confident we’re on the right course. … I am confident that an imperfect democracy is what we’ll get out of Iraq will be vastly superior to what the people of Iraq had prior to this.” Eight months later on October 31, McCain told CBS News, “I think the initial phases of it [the war] were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise.”
On the September 21, 2004, McCain further asserted on MSNBC’s Hardball, “Have mistakes been made? Yes. But the necessity of winning, I believe, is overwhelming. And I think that President Bush is presenting a clear picture of the benefits of success and the consequences of failure.” And on December 8, 2005, McCain told The Hill, “I do think that progress is being made in a lot of Iraq. Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course. If I thought we weren’t making progress, I’d be despondent.”
Indeed, McCain only became a critic of former SecDef Rumsfeld when it was politically expedient to do so. It is also a craven flip-flop because he routinely defended Rummy during the same time frame.
IMO McCain's "criticism" of the administration is not even criticism per se. It is part of a wink and nod between certain members of the Republican Party such as Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, Chuck Hegel, and others and the administration. Basically, the Bush Administration allows these criticisms because those individuals embody bipartisanship (as the WH sees it) and it allows them to troll for votes from moderate Republicans, independent, and persuadable Democrats.
The reality is when it came to voting, all of those Republicans would always side with the WH. The only GOP politician that did not do so was Lincoln Chaffee and he got primaried by (Hair)Club for Growth and ended up losing in 2006 even though he was probably as moderate as his Democratic opponent.
McCain's signature issue, experience, is a worthless metric. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and others were supposed to be the most experienced, most knowledgeable foreign policy team in history. They were about as successful as a lead zeppelin.
Two of our most experienced presidents resume wise were Herbert Hoover and George H. W. Bush. Hoover was a complete incompetent who sat back and did nothing as the Great Depression shook the very core of this nation.
Bush allowed Iraq to invade Kuwait, indicating that the WH would not object if Saddam Hussein only seized the Kuwaiti oil fields, thereby implicitly signaling tacit approval of the invasion. It was only because Hussein overplayed his hand and seized all of Kuwait that we objected. Even the supposedly successful Gulf War was a failure as the mere presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia was a pretense for Usama Bin Laden to attack American installations and later the U.S. itself.
Back to McCain. I guess when you are foul-mouthed, ill-tempered Navy brat whose only real qualification is that he survived brutal torture at the Hanoi Hilton, you have to distort your record and clearly you can't run on your intelligence. You have to make stuff up..like your wife did with those recipes she pilfered from the Food Network.