Poor John.



He has been acting more and more like a dodo bird.



You would think he would have learned by now.



But oh no, if nothing else, McCain is stuck in the groove of a lack of imagination rubbing against self-interest. In the end of course, the story is more of the same.



Self-interest rules. And if necessary, the past will be reinvented to fall into line.



And so we find ourselves back at square one amongst those who look upon John as the Chosen One….



But there is a consistent flaw in the stolid face that Original John tries to present to the world and that flaw seems to become engorged every time John opens his mouth.



You see, in case you haven’t noticed, the Senator seems to have one phrase in his vocabulary and when you build your campaign on one phrase, you’d better have it right.



But even that is beyond John’s abilities to render.



Some say, John’s slips are due to his age…..and some say it is because John is no different than most in his party who think nothing of transposing the facts to help solidify his position.



Either way, he is reinventing the past.



That past has to do with something called “The Surge.”.



And if we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times. In fact, it supersedes everything else in John’s inventory from the economy to health care; from jobs to the loss of home mortgages….



It is the defining terminology if one were to describe what McCain is all about.



Therefore, it is only fair that someone address it as, it turns out, Keith Olbermann is doing with great pleasure. Keith is expert in probing his vulnerabilities with red hot pokers and then twisting them for all to see.



Meanwhile, John doesn’t seem to be bothered as he proceeds to reinterpret history virtually every time he tries to explain it. .



Now, SURGE has become a composite term that refers to what happened before the real SURGE, before that was authorized by Bush which was, in effect, no more than the generals wanted in the first place, more boots on the ground.



And then under Bush, the phrase took on a new meaning, the Surge now—according to the beneficent leader-- was to provide the time that the government of Iraq needed in order to get its house in order as a precondition for our troops leaving the country. (Of course, at the time, we didn’t realize that our tax dollars were being used to build sixty permanent bases all over Iraq.)



But McCain’s definition conveniently leaves that out…as he does everything that happened before. He never questions the need to have gone into Iraq; he never questions why we didn’t mount an aggressive effort to get bin Laden, and he seems to go along with Bush’s ability to not only dispense with all of the motives for going into Iraq in the first place—from WMD to “yellowcake,” the UN charade, the fact that he had already made up his mind to dispose of Saddam before going into Afghanistan, our initial failures at keeping the peace, our obvious attempts to protect the oil as opposed to the people, or the banks, or the Nation’s antiquities and on and on.



It all revolves about “the Surge.”



In his flexible interpretation, the Surge is what happened before the actual SURGE took place. And he mentions it over and over again. In his own mind, he has attempted to incorporate the Surge into all that happened that had heretofore been referred to as the Anbar “Awakening” when the sheiks realized that they wanted to end the bloodshed and end the attacks on the Sunni by Al Qaeda and other dissidents. The Shieks had claimed that they had seen enough and were willing to cooperate with local commanders. . .



McCain points to his interview with the general in charge of Remaldi at that time and suggests that the SURGE really refers to that time; but that was long before Bush’s decision to send troops to Remaldi or Anbar.



It was not until January 2007 that Bush announced the decision to move thousands of more troops into Iraq. And the first troops did not begin to arrive until March 2007; meanwhile



In March 2007, before the first of the new troops began to arrive, Colonel John Charlton, the commander responsible for Remaldi, a city in Anbar Province, reported that thousands of new Sunni police on the ground in concert with friendly Sunni Sheiks had already cut the rate of crime in half.



McCain is quick to include that result in what happened after Bush’s Surge took place.



On another note, McCain’s raving about the concept of SURGE omits the fact that it was initiated for a single purpose and that was to allow the government to organize in order to allow the American troops to leave Iraq.



It has also been a proven way to positively skip over all that had gone wrong in Iraq and give it a happy if inaccurate spin. It is simply wrong to use the SURGE as a synonym for the Iraq experience, a way for the government to stop talking about their failures over more than five years---from inadequate planning to an inability to govern the country.



Most sensible people will not be so taken in and will recognize that John McCain is trying to write a history that is too fresh in most of our minds to be so manipulated.



If this is all McCain can bring to the table—a kind of “blindness” to real events—it will have even loyal Republicans shaking their heads in wonderment. Nonetheless, as we have seen before, by repeating the same inaccuracies over and over again, John McCain will benefit from his own re-invention of the facts. We have seen that before and we shall see that again.



On the other hand, John McCain might do well to consider the polls that show that 80% of the population already believe that when it comes to the leadership in this country, we are going in the wrong direction.



Hint! Hint!



Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon