John McCain in one quick paragraph

The reporting in Iraq and the limited access of reporters has hurt coverage of what is actually happening there...along with the boredom of our pundit-dominated news culture (making us the biggest squanderers of press freedoms in history).

This from Juan Cole sums things up accurately:

Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!

There have actually been several journalistic pieces pointing this out, but they are lost in the cacophony of the drum-beat, rote, screaming of the same sadists who dreamed of invading in the first place. People trying to save their legacies don't count.

From wanting to invade years before we did, to declaring things easy, to being wrong (or lying) about how awesome the war is going, to trumpeting the actual merits (while ignoring the costs) of the so-called "Surge" John McCain is a either a fool and/or a fraud.