Silly people, don't go by what McCain SAYS

Don't you just hate it when people pick on John McCain by repeating what he actually said?  By God, the press sure does.

Within hours of uttering the phrase “maybe a hundred” years at a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire in January, Senator John McCain came under attack by Democrats and antiwar groups for promoting a seemingly endless troop presence in Iraq.

Well that's clearly not fair.  A hundred years isn't actually endless.

And in later clarifying his remarks, Mr. McCain took a long, if not limitless, view: "Could be 1,000. Could be 1,000 years or a million years." At another point, he said: "A thousand years. A million years. Ten million years."

And even ten million years is "not limitless."  That's especially true when you consider that, at current rates, in ten million years US losses alone would exceed the total population of the Earth.  So fighting is bound to end way sooner than that.

So treating it as if McCain said we would be there forever is just wrong.  In fact, using anything McCain said is wrong.

He offered those as possible timelines, but only hypothetically, to make his points that terrorism had rendered the region unstable and that he would support a continued troop presence if warranted. But the timetables, flippantly tossed out, have been condensed into sound bites by his Democratic opponents, turned into fund-raising appeals and mashed into YouTube parodies. ...  The original exchange began when a self-described Democrat, whom Mr. McCain jokingly referred to as Ernest Hemingway because of his resemblance to the author, said, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years —— "

"Maybe a hundred,” Mr. McCain interjected, almost cavalierly."

See there?  McCain was speaking hypothetically, he said it cavaleirly, and most importantly the person he was talking to was a "self-described Democrat."  So none of it counts.