We finally learn why John McCain is always, always on our 'news'

Someone finally got CNN to explain why Sen. John McCain seems to have a permanent chair on all the major news networks. It certainly is a window into the dark and hollow cable news soul.

Don’t ask CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist to make any apologies for featuring the feedback of the Arizona senator: “He has appeared for decades on cable news programs, network news programs. He’s articulate, he knows what he’s talking about and he has strong positions. He represents the views of millions and he represents them effectively. He’s a veteran and is loved by many veterans and he’s not just a senator; he’s a former Republican presidential nominee and a war hero.”

We'll set the "articulate" aside. He knows what he's talking about, though? Really, we're doing this again? All right:

Ahem. The majority of John McCain's foreign policy positions over the last fifteen years are notable for being spectacularly wrong. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he was making the rounds asserting Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he dismissed the scale and the potential casualties of the war, or when he claimed our Iraq intervention would "stabilize" the region. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he went to Syria to insist that we should be arming the "good" rebels while getting photographs with "good" rebels who turned out to be terrorists. To have faith that John McCain knows what he's talking about is, at this point, akin to having faith that your room full of typing monkeys will be producing the next great American novel any day now. Oh, he has strong positions, I'll give you that one. It's just that the strong positions tend to—how shall we say this politely?—get a lot of people killed.

That's the thing, though. In Washington-speak, John McCain knows what he is talking about because the part about being catastrophically wrong is still, damn it, entirely beside the point. Being wrong won't get you discredited so long as you can still speak similarly good word-things through your mouth-hole the next time around. Spilt milk! Stop living in the past! Effective talking at people is rewarded; ineffective or incompetent boobery in the actual things you talk about is fine so long as you can make it to the next commercial break.

This is why we have climate denial, you know—because he knows what he is talking about need not bear any relation to the actual facts of the world, so a scientist and any well-groomed heel are considered to have exactly the same amount of wisdom to contribute to the question. This is why we keep signing ourselves up for wars, only to end them ingloriously after it turns out the facts on the ground were not at all what the loud people in the nice suits told us they would be. This is why we still think tax cuts to wealthy people will result in prosperity for all. This is why George Will exists.

No, the day when being proven wrong or a liar counts as a professional strike against you is the apocalyptic day half the pundits in Washington live in fear of; the day one person is called to task for being incompetent in their self-professed expertise is a day when some other very wrong people might see the hatchet come for them as well, and we can't have that. Let the wars and the floods come, if the alternative is that.

More: “I think that for a 78-year-old senator, he . . . remains a strong and important voice in American politics and a relevant voice in American politics,” says Feist, whose “unscientific” analysis is that McCain hasn’t been appearing on CNN more recently than he has over the past couple of decades (fact-checkable!).

He's a strong voice in politics because he is a strong voice in politics. Enough said. And don't bother fact-checking that last part, because we've already hit the commercial break.

Please just go away already!

Jon Stewart Reminds Us Why John McCain Has No Business Offering Advice on Iraq

Jon Stewart calls out the Republicans pointing fingers at Obama over Iraq and reminds us that they're all "completely f--king wrong" about it, particularly lead singer John McCain.

Said McCain: "We had that war won, and we blew it."

Stewart: "And all we would have to do to maintain the victory is stay there forever. It's like when you win at a casino, and to get the money you have to live there."

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Unbelievable! John McCain Flat-Out LIES About US Casualties in Iraq

It is often difficult to admit that we are no longer competent to do our jobs and that it is time to move on and leave the work to someone more capable, but we all must face that moment sooner or later. That time has arrived for John McCain. The only other explanation for his comments on the developing crisis in Iraq is that he is intentionally attempting to mislead in order to attack the current administration.

McCain has been making the rounds of the cable news shows this week to condemn the administration for creating the atmosphere which has allowed the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites to once again reach a fever pitch telling The Guardian on Thursday:

“The president should get rid of his entire national security team, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and bring the team in who won the conflict in Iraq in to turn this situation around, but it’s going to be extremely difficult to do so.”

On Friday, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, John McCain compared leaving a residual force to maintain order in Iraq to those left following other conflicts in Japan, Korea and Bosnia.

McCain told Chris Cuomo on CNN’s New Day on Friday:

“It’s important for us to note that in other wars and other conflicts, we have left residual forces behind, not in a combat role, but a stabilizing role. Whether it be Korea, Japan, Germany. We still have forces in Bosnia from that conflict. We had it won, and we needed to have a residual force.”

It is quite a stretch to compare Iraq and Bosnia in any way, in Iraq we had over 4,500 fatalities as opposed to 18 in Bosnia in a conflict that was driven by ethnic divisions which are always much easier to resolve than religious divisions.

McCain then made the most telling statement, the one that proves he has lost all contact with reality:

“We had literally no casualties there in Iraq during the last period after the surge was over, and by leaving a vacuum, then that was obviously filled.”

Literally? It would seem that the Senator has forgotten the meaning of the word since we did, in fact, take casualties including 66 fatalities and 297 wounded in the year following the surge before our final troops left the country in December of 2011. The Senator might be forgiven for saying that we sustained few casualties, since it was by comparison to other years in the war a low number but to claim that there were absolutely none is just not true.

Watch McCain’s absurd remarks in the video below.

McCain just can’t seem to help himself

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran into a little trouble last week. The Republican senator, a little too eager to condemn the Obama White House, complained about the prisoner swap that freed an American POW despite having already endorsed the exact same plan a few months prior. After getting caught, McCain falsely accused his critics of “lying.”

Making matters slightly worse, the Arizona lawmaker, himself a former POW, complained to the media that he hadn’t learned anything from a classified briefing on Bowe Bergdahl’s release, neglecting to mention that he’d left in the middle of it.

Despite – or perhaps, because of – these embarrassments, McCain scored another Sunday-show invitation, where he somehow managed to add insult to injury.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday called the five Guantanamo detainees released in a prisoner swap for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl “hardcore military jihadists who are responsible for 9/11” and said he expects them to return to fighting against the U.S.

In context, looking at the full transcript, it’s hard to say whether McCain believes these five detainees were “responsible for 9/11” or whether he believes all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were “responsible for 9/11,” but either way, the senator is plainly wrong.

McCain added, in reference to the Bergdahl prisoner-swap, “I wouldn’t release these men, not these men. They were evaluated and judged as too great a risk to release.”

That’s wrong, too. In fact, the former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay told msnbc’s Alex Witt over the weekend that at first he didn’t even recognize these detainees’ names. “To trade five of them for a U.S. service member, in my estimation, and I’m often critical of President [Barack] Obama, I think they struck a pretty good deal,” retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis said.

What’s more, just a few months ago, McCain personally endorsed the plan to transfer these exact same Taliban prisoners. When he says he wouldn’t have completed the swap for “these men,” he’s neglecting to mention that he’d already expressed public support for swapping “these men.”

And all of this led to the creme de la crème:

“I believe that there are other prisoners, some of whom we have already released, that we could have released that – in exchange,” McCain argued.

If someone could explain what this means, I’d appreciate it. Putting aside the fact that McCain already endorsed the plan to swap these exact same prisoners before he changed his mind and denied changing his mind, it’s not at all clear how U.S. officials could have swapped prisoners “whom we have already released.”

It’s tempting to think that, one of these days, the Beltway will stop looking to McCain as an expert on matters related to national security and the military, but I’ve been waiting for that day for quite a while. It never seems to arrive.

Cindy McCain Petitions John McCain to Support ENDA

An HRC organizer nabbed Cindy McCain at a Staples in Phoenix, and got her to sign a petition on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and send it to her husband, the Washington Post reports:

Arizona is a key state, since activists are targeting both McCain and his fellow Republican Sen. Jeff Flake; McCain has opposed the bill in the past, while Flake has not voted on the issue since taking office in January...

...At the moment, it does not appear that Cindy McCain has changed her husband's mind. In an e-mail, McCain's spokesman Brian Rogers wrote, "Senator McCain enjoys and appreciates having discussions on the important issues of the day with all the members of his family, and he respects their views."

Some bigots are really hard to turn.

Tea Party Nation Claims John McCain Is An ‘Illegal Immigrant’

According to an article published by Tea Party Nation and reported on by Think Progress, Republican Arizona Senator John McCain is an “illegal immigrant.”  From the den of dumbassery, otherwise know as teapartynation.com:

An illegal immigrant can be described as someone who sneaks into another country.  That is a fair definition, even if they do not stay long. 
One illegal immigrant has done massive damage to America. 
Who is this illegal immigrant and what did he do to damage America?
The illegal immigrant is John McCain.
McCain sneaked into Syria yesterday and met with the so-called Syrian rebels.   McCain spent Memorial Day, the day we honor America’s fallen heroes, meeting with a group who hates America and Americans.

John McCain’s War

Apparently Senator John McCain’s senility and dementia has reached a new level. He wandered into Syria over the weekend thinking it was Wal-Mart and he was there to buy pleated Dockers and plaid button up shirts. Yes, sadly, senility has finally set in for ol’ John Boy. He’s lost control of his faculties, clearly. No one would just sneak into a country being ripped apart by a bloody sectarian civil war that neither side really looks like the ones we want to partner with for some Memorial Day Weekend barbecue. Well, unless you’re just suffering from some kind of memory loss brought on by being completely and utterly senile. Otherwise it would almost look as if the old buzzard was trying to get America involved in a war all on his own.

Quelle Reagan.

Is this what all Republicans do in their Golden Years…fund little illegal wars? Maybe it’s like Viagra to them and they can’t get off unless they know they’re funneling armaments to shady people that will turn around use their weapons and training on us. McCain’s hawkishness over the years has been rather vulgar and increasingly embarrassing to the country at large. Remember, he’s the one who joked about bombing Iran during the 2008 presidential campaign, he’s the guy who wants us in Iraq and Afghanistan forever, and he still goes on record everywhere he can — most notably during Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing – as defending not only the legality and necessity of the Iraq War, but the success of it too. He’s one of a handful of people outside of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who actually think the Iraq War wasn’t and will remain the worst foreign policy decision of our lifetimes. McCain has a hard-on for war for like very few we’ve ever seen.