McCain v Reality: Reality, 2. McCain, 0.

The John McCain campaign seems to be picking arguments with reality today on a couple of different fronts and losing badly.

First, there's the fact that the candidate with all the reputed serious credentials in national security doesn't know his geography well enough to distinguish between Iraq and Afghanistan, as discussed in AZDem's recommended diary.

Then there's the McCain campaign's delusional insistence on a conference call today that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki's remarks about endorsing the Democratic candidate's call for a timetable on withdrawing troops from Iraq.

In a conference called just now with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann responded to a question about Malik's comments by citing "the reaction from the Iraqi government, which made it clear that there were apparently some translation problems in the quote, that's not the position of the prime minister."

"I certainly can't believe that the Obama campaign would take a quote that's already been clarified out of context, and try to hang their Iraq policy on that," Scheunemann later added.

The problem here is twofold. First, the New York Times has provided its own independent translation that proved Maliki said precisely what he was reported to have said:

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

If any further support is needed, AP put a story out on the wire just a couple of hours ago that additionally refutes the "out of context" claim that the McCain conference call flaks continue to try to sell:

Iraq's government spokesman is hopeful that U.S. combat forces could be out of the country by 2010.

Ali al-Dabbagh made the comments following a meeting in Baghdad on Monday between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day.

So Obama and al-Maliki are indeed on the same page, while McCain is struggling to find Iraq's borders on the map. So it goes.