It is so sad to see what Arizona Senator John McCain has become. This is a guy who I actually thought I could be okay with if he’d won in the 2000 presidential election. The Maverick. A reasonable Republican. Not so much anymore. Now he tries to keep up with the crazies in his party and, by doing so, kills what is left of his political career.
After the Pulse nightclub shooting, McCain made a ham-handed attempt to blame President Obama for that massacre. But the backlash from his statement came quickly and, by that afternoon, his people were back-pedaling on it.
Now he is playing the blame game once again, trying to pin the Nice tragedy on President Obama. His logic is not like our Earth logic and he has lost any memory of the part his pals in the Bush administration played in the creation of DAESH/ISIS. No, as far as McCain is concerned, everything is Obama’s fault.
… I also have to tell you, that as long as we have a leadership in this country — the president of the United States — who allowed this to happen, his policies are directly responsible for ISIS and ISIS is responsible for these attacks.
Jumped on that one pretty quick, didn’t he? DAESH only just claimed responsibility for that attack. Personally, I think that they go ahead and claim responsibility for every attack they can when the perpetrator dies. Who is going to contradict them? The police in Nice didn’t seem to think that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a DAESH foot soldier. But folks like McCain, who wouldn’t trust a foot soldier as far as he could throw him, automatically accept their claim.
McCain, talking with Arizona radio station KTAR, continued:
We had the war won, thanks to the service of so many brave Americans that sacrificed their blood and treasure, and the president decided to pull everybody out of Iraq.
Okay, let me stop you there, Sparky. According to Condoleezza Rice, then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “reneged” on an agreement to leave a residual force of 40,000 troops in Iraq. Her boss, George W. Bush, wasn’t happy but did sign the Status of Forces Agreement, on Dec. 14, 2008. When Obama took office, he did try to renegotiate the deal but talks stalled. Then-defense secretary, Leon Panetta, said that, at that point, renegotiation would have been “very difficult.” Granted, it could have been done. Maybe. If the Republican party hadn’t been fighting Obama on every single thing he tried to do. We will never know.
The so-called de-Baathification that went on when we first invaded Iraq was also a big factor in the rise of DAESH. Many of the men who created the militant group had been higher-ups in Saddam Hussein’s government and army. And that policy, that de-Baathification law, can be laid at the feet of Bush-ite L. Paul Bremer.
Back to McCain’s comments. After getting the history of DAESH wrong, McCain continued, blaming Obama again:
This president has no strategy and no, in my view at least in the short-term, ability or willingness to attack this evil. This president has failed miserably and all this stuff didn’t have to happen. I’m sorry to say that I predicted everything that has happened, and I predict more attacks just as the director of National Intelligence and the head of the CIA have predicted. This president has failed America and the world.
McCain is promulgating the right-wing narrative that Obama isn’t being forceful or vicious enough when it comes to the war on DAESH. That narrative is wrong. According to several military officers — both currently serving and retired — we are kicking their asses. A senior Central Command officer told Politico’s Mark Perry just three days ago:
We don’t have a victory yet, but we’re winning and it’s not even close. The campaign is absolutely relentless, very violent. We’re killing a lot of their people. That’s a fact, and it’s undeniable.
These attacks we are seeing in Europe, assuming that all of them actually are orchestrated by DAESH, are the response of a cornered animal. They are losing in their territory so they strike back wherever they can, trying to look bigger. The CentCom officer noted that many DAESH fighters are fleeing Iraq because they don’t want to stay and be killed by our attacks. So we have fighters going wherever they can to cause mayhem.
You’d think that John McCain, a former military officer, would want to know where we are in this fight against DAESH. But, apparently, he is satisfied with just sitting back, watching and blaming President Obama for everything that happens everywhere in the world. Pretty lame. I sure hope Anne Kirkpatrick takes his Senate seat from him. Time for him to retire while he still has a shred of dignity left.
Here is the audio from KTAR radio:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/274232581″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images