McCain's Weekly Make-Overs Won't Do The Trick

It wasn't damaging enough for McCain that Obama went overseas and has been greeted incredibly well by American troops and foreign leaders and that his ideas have been overwhelmingly embraced everywhere he goes-- as well as back home. McCain should have probably just let him have his week. Instead his campaign started carping and whining even before Obama had left about unfair press coverage. When Obama was being mobbed in Baghdad by American troops and being virtually endorsed by the entire Iraqi government, McCain was met by a part time reporter with a cell phone camera at a small airport in New Hampshire. McCain, as Joe Klein explained, then had a serious breakdown, lashing out like a vicious psychopath. Luckily poor Cindy (or even Rick Renzi) weren't around to bear the brunt of his towering rage. I heard Klein saying this, almost word for word on CNN this morning:

This is the ninth presidential campaign I've covered. I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

He's referring to the statement about Obama wishing we lost the war. McCain has lost it entirely. He's an embarrassment and the Republicans should just put him out of his misery and nominate Ron Paul.

The media is starting to wonder if McCain is too old, which isn't really fair because there are plenty of people who are even older who have, unlike McCain, adapted to the 21st Century in fine fashion. The media is also starting to look at his gaffes, gaffes that are often not gaffes but, as Ilan Goldenberg puts it, serious examples of fundamental misunderstanding.

John McCain made a mistake this evening, which as far as I'm concerned disqualifies him from being President.  It is so appalling and so factually wrong that I'm actually sitting here wondering who McCain's advisers are.  This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border.  It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year.  It is even more disturbing because according to John McCain, Iraq is the central front in the "war on terror."  If we are going to have an Iraq-centric policy, he should at least understand what he is talking about... This is not controversial history.  It is history that anyone trying out for Commander in Chief must understand when there are 150,000 American troops stationed in Iraq.  It is an absolutely essential element to the story of the past two years. YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG.  Moreover, what is most disturbing is that according to McCain's inaccurate version of history, military force came first and solved all of our problems.  If that is the lesson he takes from the Anbar Awakening, I am afraid it is the lesson he will apply to every other crisis he faces including, for example, Iran.

This is just incredibly disturbing. I have no choice but to conclude that John McCain has simply no idea what is actually happened and happening in Iraq. 

McCain is fighting back by having some of the most pathetic Bush rubber stamps on his sinking ship sniping at Obama by calling him fighteningly inexperienced. Republicans in Washington are so worried that an Obama landslide-- coupled with McCain's well-proven negative coattails (every single candidate he's campaigned for has lost)-- will spell complete disaster for the GOP in November. The Rove operative who was brought in to take internal power away from some of the self-serving lobbyists and now runs the campaign, is pushing-- at Rove's suggestion-- for a complete message make-over, one totally dominated by the kind of Rovian negative messaging that McCain himself has been a victim of in the past.