BFFs
It's a darn good thing that we still have Sunday news shows. Without them, we wouldn't know every single thing Sen. John McCain ever thought about anything, on any particular week. This week we learned why, when McCain previously blamed Senate hostility towards Chuck Hagel on Hagel calling Bush "the worst president since Herbert Hoover" and comparing Iraq to Vietnam, he didn't actually mean that and this is
not payback for all that
so shut up:
Of course not. That is-- fact-- in fact, most of those senators who will be voting weren't even in the Senate when Mr. Hagel-- did those things.
We learned that Chuck Hagel is now a crazy radical leftist, which apparently is McCain-speak for "anything that pisses me off":
[T]he positions that he has taken on various issues is frankly-- been out of-- not only out of mainstream, but far to the left.
We learned that McCain
now thinks he's not qualified, but meh, screw it, he was just making a point—I mean, he was "requesting information," but meh, screw that too:
I don't believe that we should hold up his nomination any further, because I think it's a reasonable amount of time to have questions answered, not two days' worth.
We learned that even John McCain has no goddamn idea what exactly he's carping on, with regards to Benghazi:
Well, I don't know the answer to that question.
… but that nonetheless it's a "massive cover up." So join me below the fold to learn just what's being covered up.
MCCAIN: So there are many, many questions. And we have had-- a massive cover-up on the part of--
DAVID GREGORY: A massive cover-up of what?
[bickering crosstalk]
MCCAIN: Of the information-- concerning the deaths of four brave Americans. The information has not been forthcoming.
Hey, remember how we entered a whole goddamn shootin' war based on "information" that wasn't there and then everyone in government said oh well, "information" happens, live and learn, eh? Yeah. Some of us are still bitter about that. Thank God, however, that McCain will never rest until he finds out what time the president went to bed that night, the precise machinations by which the CIA began to think it maybe was or was not an al Qaeda-affiliated attack, and whether or not Chuck Freaking Hagel is a secret leftist because he let the cat out of the bag and suggested that He Who Must No Longer Be Named was perhaps
not the expansive military and economic genius that everyone said he was, until they started to figure that maybe he wasn't, at which point we just don't talk about him anymore but here's his every supporter and cabinet member, still propped up as brilliant intellectual what-the-hell-evers, but Hagel's crime against humanity was realizing that while the entire rest of his party was still damn vested in nobody saying any of that out loud and HEY LOOK OVER THERE—BENGHAZI!
So anyway, that's what Sen. Sunday has been up to. Apparently he has crazy deep principles, which primarily manifest themselves as pointless temporary holds on things after which he forgets all about it and moves on to the next deep principles. I'd chastise the networks for having him on week after week after week, but honestly, what other "serious Republican" are they really gonna get?
For a more specific rebuttal to McCain's apparent outrage, see Richard Riss' post, here.