Standing in the cheese aisle of an all-American supermarket, John McCain takes his surge mishap from the other day ... and makes it worse. This time, he's explaining that "the surge" -- that magical unicorn of Iraq fixology -- didn't begin in January 2007 when President Bush announced it, or in June 2007 when all of the additional troops were in country (mostly in Baghdad, by the way, not Anbar province, where the "Sunni awakening" took place in August 2006) but at, before, or sometime around the time of said awakening ... meaning ... it ... happened before even President Bush knew about it? Oh, just watch the "Countdown" clip:
The Carpetbagger Report has more on the McCain team's botched fix job.
Here’s the new McCain campaign rationale for his obvious screw-up: the surge, for all of you calendar-lovers, may technically have come after the launch of the Anbar Awakening, but it doesn’t matter because were it not for the surge, the Awakening would have failed miserably. The influx of U.S. troops may have come after the Awakening, but it made the success of the Awakening possible. That, in a nutshell, is the new argument.
As spin goes, that’s pretty creative. But that doesn’t make it right.
First, the McCain campaign is making a case that’s supported by practically nothing. The vast majority of the troops involved with the surge went to Baghdad, not Anbar, the latter of which saw one U.S. brigade. Did the presence of this brigade make the surge successful? It can’t be disproven, but it’s hardly the accepted consensus, either.
Second, and more importantly, the latest spin is disconnected to what McCain, you know, actually said. McCain insisted that the surge “began the Anbar awakening.” It didn’t. In fact, to hear McCain tell it, the only Awakening the surge happened — not succeeded, but happened — is the surge, which is clearly false. All the after-the-fact rationalizing won’t change this obvious mistake.
And by the way, the Colonel that McCain keeps referencing, Col. MacFarland, doesn't support his story, as even conservative media critic Howard Kurtz has figured out:
the official, Col. Sean MacFarland, has said that Sunni leaders began cooperating against al-Qaeda months before President Bush's surge began.
CBS News SVP Paul Friedman said in a statement: "The report was edited under extreme time constraints and one piece of tape was put in the wrong order. Fortunately, this did not in any way distort what Senator McCain was saying."
But did the "wrong order" mean a violation of their Standards? Crooks and Liars reports the CBS News Standards (sec. 111-5 Editing, to be exact) says, "If a question to an interview subject is used, the answer must be to that specific question."
As has been made clear over the last 24 hours, that did not happen.
It's not as if TV and cable news outlets haven't used editing to "shape" an interview to fit the prevailing narrative. Such editing hatchet jobs are actually pretty common, as General Wes Clark recently found out. But the CBS edit snaffu stands out because it isn't about omission, it's about a news organization actually rearranging a subject's answer in a way that, intentionally or not, shielded the subject from their own embarrassing words. It's no wonder that, despite the whining and carping from the McCain camp, most rational people believe that there is no political figure in America, with the possible exception of Collin Powell, who has enjoyed more loving treatment from the press than John McCain. To quote CNN's Jeffrey Toobin:
"...if there is one public figure in America who has gotten better press over the years than John McCain, I don't know who it is."
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%>
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%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
