McCain Overcome By Own Self-Importance?

By Cernig

Yet another Republican warmonger who wants us to believe it's all about him:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.

McCain, at a town hall meeting in this Philadelphia suburb, was asked if he had concerns that anti-American militants in Iraq might ratchet up their activities in Iraq to try to increase casualties in September or October and tip the November election against him.

"Yes, I worry about it," McCain said. "And I know they pay attention because of the intercepts we have of their communications ... The hardest thing in warfare is to counter someone or a group of individuals who are willing to take their own lives in order to take others."

Actually...no, John. The hardest thing in warfare is to overcome someone who is willing to spend other people's lives like water in a vainglorious excuse for a strategy while staying safely away from the shooting themself. Just as any of the very few survivors of the trenches of 1914-1918. Bin Laden certainly falls into that category otherwise he'd have gone to meet Allah by virtue of his own suicide vest by now. So do you, George Bush, and your shared coterie of neocon advisors.

My colleague Eric wrote earlier today:

The most charitable reading of McCain...is that he is trying to gin up fear through evoking a specter that he knows to be a chimera. In short, he is lying to the American people in order to maintain support for the Iraq occupation that he believes is justifiable for other, non-stated reasons. The other plausible reading is that McCain is simply gallingly ignorant as to the nature of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses in Iraq and beyond.

I doubt a former military man, even if only a junior officer, is so ignorant. Like other Republicans for the last eight years, McCain is just trying to scare the American populace into voting for him, the very, very last, staunch bastion of the free and civilized world. *Snort*