McCain aide suspended for pushing racially-charged Wright/Obama video.
Dana Perino scoops up after Dick Cheney, in today’s White House press briefing:
From the earlier post there seems to be some confusion. No one is saying that John McCain’s service as a Navy pilot shows or suggests that he lacks the grasp of strategy and national interest to be president. What I’m saying is that the available evidence, and there’s a lot of it, shows that McCain is unable to see beyond immediate tactical questions to any larger grasp of strategy. His myopia about the ‘surge’ is simply one example of that. I raise the issue of his Navy pilot service because McCain has based so much of his campaign on the premise that that service gives him a unique insight into foreign affairs. But the strategic sense he lacks is not one you’d get from that kind of service.
Meanwhile TPM Reader RW says that the real issue isn’t so much short-term tactics vs. broader strategy as the military vs. the political prism. But I actually think this a disservice to all the military men and women who’ve got no problem in this department. This is a stereotype people have about career military people that’s seldom been born out by my experience. This is something about McCain, his myopia. He can’t see the big picture or anything else that’s going on in the world except Iraq. And even there he doesn’t want to grapple with what the goal of the surge even was.
First John McCain said that Iran was trained and arming al Qaeda in Iraq. Then Joe Lieberman corrected him and he apologized and corrected himself. Now his campaign is saying … well, he was right after all.
Apparently Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a guest of the Clintons at the White House in 1998 at the gathering of religious leaders where Clinton described his contrition over the Lewinsky scandal.
From the Post …
President Bush said the Iranian government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and vowed that the United States would be “firm” in preventing Tehran’s acquisition of such arms.
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Washington has long suspected that Iran wants to use its civilian nuclear power program as cover for an effort to build nuclear weapons. But the Iranian government has not publicly declared a desire to obtain such weapons. In fact, Iranian leaders have said the opposite, repeatedly insisting that they do not want nuclear arms and asserting that their nuclear program is intended only to generate electricity.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation specializing in nuclear policy, called Bush’s statement “uninformed” and “troubling.”
“Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason,” he said. “It’s just not true.”
Asked to explain Bush’s comment, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he spoke in “shorthand,” combining Iranian threats against Israel with concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.
“The president was referring to the Iranian regime’s previous statements regarding their desire to wipe Israel off the map,” Johndroe said. “The president shorthanded his answer with regard to Iran’s previously secret nuclear weapons program and their current enrichment and ballistic missile testing.”
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According to Farsi-speaking commentators including Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad’s exact quote was, “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole has written that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the “Nazi-style extermination of a people,” but was expressing the wish that the Israeli government would disappear just as the shah of Iran’s regime had collapsed in 1979.
So where do we stand in the presidential race? Have Wright and the CinC questions hurt Obama? It’s just a snapshot. But as of today the answer looks like a pretty clear yes. In today’s campaign 2008 roundup we survey the numbers …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
Hard to know just what to make of this at this point. But let’s flag it and keep watching: two fired and now another disciplined for breaching Obama’s passport file at the State Department.
Remember, something very similar happened to Bill Clinton in 1992 — eventually brushed under the rug by an ‘independent’ counsel investigation by Joe DiGenova.
Carnac the Magnificent foresees no endorsement from John Edwards tonight on The Tonight Show.