No. 1 and 2: But enough about what I think, what do you think I think?
It's official. Sen. John McCain
is the most talked-to person on the Sunday shows.
When it comes to appearing on these programs, Mr. McCain might as well have his own segment: Since the beginning of 2009, he has appeared 97 times, more often than any other current or former politician, according to The Upshot’s analysis of data collected on the shows by American University researchers. [...]
Normally, the shows’ viewers have had to wait fewer than 21 days to see Mr. McCain on their screens: In 70 instances, they could have seen him within the three previous weeks.
Sen. Lindsey Graham takes the No. 2 spot, filling the necessary role of also interviewing the person who is around Sen. John McCain most often and whose opinions most mirror his. (We can all be glad that Sen. Joe Lieberman retired, or Graham would have to duel him for the position. Nobody wants to see that.) The most called-upon House members are led by Rep. Mike Rogers, frequently called upon for his supposed expertise in hell if we know, and appointed House expert in All Of The Things Paul Ryan, because anyone who has ever been a Republican presidential or vice-presidential candidate is automatically someone to be shoved forcibly down the American gullet forever after (see: Palin, Sarah).
As for Sen. John McCain, the dominant question is why. Why do we get an update on what Sen. John McCain personally thinks about any given topics at roughly three-week intervals? It can't be because Arizona is the linchpin of American political opinion, and even if it were, Sen. John McCain would make for a poor representative of his state's ever-frequent innovations in the arts of racism and barely intelligible paranoia. It can't be his status as ex-presidential candidate, because his party has all but disowned him since that point. It presumably is not because of John McCain's oft-stated foreign policy wisdom, because John McCain's oft-stated foreign policy wisdom has been proven the opposite of wise after every seeming proclamation. No, we were not being menaced by Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." No, the Syrian fighters John McCain met with and demand we supply with heavy weaponry were not necessarily the "good" terrorists. He is not quite the senator version of the impeccably wrong Bill Kristol, the rosetta stone of all failed American foreign policy ideas for two decades and counting, but he is damn close.
Jump below the fold for more.
I'll be honest, I find the media fixation with exploring the thoughts of John McCain baffling. I realize this is the part of the bit where I am supposed to come up with some wisdom as to why his thoughts on foreign policy are so dominant despite their own track record, or at least a few conjectures, but I've always been stumped by it. It is true that he (1) is a still-living human being who can talk and (2) seems to be always willing to oblige, but that still does not explain the apparent fetish for booking him. Yes, he is one of the Republicans in a position of theoretical foreign-policy authority, but does it not matter that he is demonstrably not good at it?
In my defense, I'm not the only one stumped by the McCain fixation. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf struggled with a similar question over McCain's omnipresent (albeit likely ghostwritten) editorial submissions, notable primarily for their pervasive indifference to the world of facts.
For a thorough evisceration of McCain's most recent Times op-ed, co-bylined with Senator Lindsey Graham, see my colleague Peter Beinart's recent article. His critique of the authors' factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations is so persuasive I began to marvel that a reputable newspaper published the piece. Then I looked back at McCain's past contributions to prestigious newspapers. That he's still treated as a foreign-policy expert is not to opinion journalism's credit.
Begin with his uncorrected Times op-ed from March 12, 2003, "The Right War for the Right Reasons." He writes, "Saddam Hussein still refuses to give up his weapons of mass destruction. Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts—in this case, that a tyrant who survives only by the constant use of violence is not going to be coerced into good behavior by nonviolent means—could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war."
Let's stop right there because there's no need to torture ourselves with more of McCain's war-bluster when most of us remember the gist of it just fine. Actually I lied, here's a bit more:
He also assured readers that once the invasion began, "Far fewer will perish than are killed every year by an Iraqi regime that keeps power through the constant use of lethal violence."
And he wrote, "no one can plausibly argue that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein will not significantly improve the stability of the region and the security of American interests and values."
The ability to be so catastrophically wrong not just in premise, but
in every last particular of that premise is itself impressive, a feat usually only accomplished by spring-breakers who think they can dive into a swimming pool from their hotel balcony. He wasn't just wrong about the rationale for war, he was an incompetent judge of both the tactical and strategic implications of that action, wrong in both the most immediate sense (casualties) and in the broadest possible foreign policy sense (whether or not dismantling the country would "stabilize" the region.) Perhaps you could argue for forgiveness of his war-era policy botches if they resulted in an apparent better grasp of policy realities afterwards, but no such evolution has taken place; we are still told that aggressive military action against (X) will result in few innocent casualties (P) and a stabilized region (R), we have just changed the variables to be plugged into the identical equation. McCain's writers could offer up the same editorial piece today, swapping in
Syria for
Iraq, and nobody would blink. He could even swap positions, from an anti-Assad, pro-rebels to a begrudgingly pro-Assad, anti-rebel stance (not that he would do such a thing, heavens no) with few changes. Dangerous group or government (X) will be violently engaged with minimal innocent casualties (P) and will result in a much-improved, more American-friendly region (R), and no one "can plausibly argue" otherwise, rinse, repeat.
Or, perhaps you could argue for forgiveness of his past foreign policy ineptitude if the universe of possible foreign policy experts were so vanishingly small that we could not do without his wisdom and still trundle along with the debate at all. That would suppose the intellectual resources of the country could all fit in a teacup, or at least that they were so spartan that no matter how catastrophic John McCain's personal recommendations had proven to be or how sloppily constructed his current wordsmithed arguments remain now, he still is, on merit, the better of them all. I trust that theory needs no further response, though the continued inclusion of the aforementioned Bill Kristol—who holds no position of power that needs catering-to whatsoever and has been even more egregiously incompetent in his pronouncements—suggests that the universe of perceived persons qualified to comment on matters of war and peace does remain so vanishingly small that there is no level of incompetence that would get a name crossed off that meager list. Perhaps we need a talent competition to build the ranks, something like Dancing With The Stars for potential foreign policy voices, in which an American history student is paired against, say, a George Will and we see which can navigate the particulars of a particular policy debate the longest before making a total boob of themselves.
Or, perhaps you could argue that being wrong about actual warfare, warfare in which the explicitly stated rationale was proven to be manufactured by the aggressor nation, a war with unknown tens of thousands of innocents killed, and one that left our own nation with staggering debts to be paid, ought not be a disqualification from advocating future warfare. While the international courts have raised more than eyebrows at the thought, through recent history, the nation's press has indeed seemed to internalize that one as well. Spilt milk, after all. No harm done, at least none that any of the truly important people, the truly valued people, still care about.
Point taken.
Since I think the people that so eagerly solicit the opinions of one Sen. John McCain in matters of war would resoundingly reject at least the last two premises—the ones that make them out to be either a self-indulgent American bourgeoisie or the willing accomplices of monsters—the only thing I can come up with that I think the pundit class themselves would nod their heads at would be the premise that it is not truly important whether John McCain is wrong: What is important is that it is what Sen. John McCain thinks. That Sen. John McCain is such a powerful influence on foreign policy that his proclamation of what he personally believes is, regardless of merit, the actual story to be told. He is an important person in the Senate, after all. He will have some sway in whether or not we move to take action against (X) in order to "improve" region (R). Whether or not his facts are correct or his estimations even remotely accurate are not at issue, because the important information being brought to the American public is What John McCain Thinks, period. That is what will govern the resulting punditry debate, not trivia-fodder facts or the part where we tried these things before and came home missing, in many cases literally, a leg.
There's some appeal to that. It fits comfortably in the current metrics of media debate, which dictate that what a small collection of professionally partisan voices have to say is the dominant force behind everything that anyone might ever consider "news." If something happens in Ferguson, Missouri, you need only call up the same set of voices that you called up last week to explain why environmental laws were oppressive or the week before to declare whether the current Iraqi government was a good one or a bad one—it is all the same Shit, and can all be dispensed with in the same format by the same voices between commercials for the same products and/or services. (Individual voice first, partisan stance second, actual underlying issue third: If anything can be gleaned from these long years of Sunday shows and prominent editorial-page bookings, it is that we explore these things according to who is talking about them, not what they are talking about.)
Sen. John McCain is a dominant voice in our policy debates because, in other words, Sen. John McCain is a dominant voice in our policy debates. He is a punditry Kardashian; he is there because he is there.