Mr. McCain said the American public was not receiving "the full picture about what's happening," and he described the delegation's visit to a downtown market where scores of people have died this year in multiple car bombings and other attacks.  There, the (Republican) members of Congress said, they strolled around, haggled with merchants and drank tea.
--"4 G.I.'s Among Dead in Iraq; McCain Cites Progress," Kirk Semple, New York Times, April 2, 2007

NBC's Nightly News provided further details about McCain's one-hour guided tour.  He was accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead."  Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.
--provided by Talking Points Memo, April 2, 2007

Parts of the Shorja market, normally one of the capital's busiest commercial districts, is now fortified with blast walls and barriers that cut off vehicle traffic.  In February, a truck bomb there killed 137 people and injured scores...

Amir Raheem, 32, a floor carpeting merchant in the Shorja market, disagreed with the upbeat assessment of the congressional visitors...He said Sunni insurgents routinely clashed with Shiite militiamen or with Iraqi soldiers and policemen in the area.  "Everybody closes their shops at 2:30 p.m.," he said...

Worse, he said, the closure of the main street by barriers has affected his business.  If it was so safe, he said, "let them open the street, for the market has died since they put them there."

On Sunday, he said, U.S. soldiers were present in large numbers during the congressional visit and would not let customers "even cross the street to the other side."
"Visiting Iraq, McCain Cites Progress on Safety Issues," Sudarsan Raghavan and Saad al-Izzi, Washington Post Foreign Service, Washington Post, April 2, 2007


I'm so sick of Republican B-roll bullshit that I don't even know where to start.

I used to admire and respect John McCain, for his service to this country, his heroism, and his willingness to work across the aisle to sponsor important legislation with Democrats and even liberals like Russ Feingold.  For a long time, he seemed to be the "maverick" he's portrayed as being, and the "straight-shooter" he likes to call himself.

But this.

This is so blatant a lie, so bodacious a misrepresentation of the truth on the ground that I, for one, will never forgive him for it.  This is not a matter of his only seeing a peaceful area and extrapolating over the whole country, maybe mistakenly thinking things were better, like the old story about the blind men only being confronted with one part of an elephant.

No.  This is DELIBERATE misrepresentation.  A DELIBERATE attempt to manipulate the media, and it is so clear now, so easy to see that he has hired as his top political advisor the same man who masterminded the loathesome Swift Boat ads against John Kerry--a man who defended McCain himself against baseless attacks by the Bush campaign when he was running in the Republican primaries in 2000.

McCain knew full well that the market, just barely across the street from the heavily-fortified Green Zone, had been basically shut down for their visit, and he knew full well that he and his escort, General Petraeus, were absolutely surrounded, on the ground and in the air, by U.S. Army troops while they "casually strolled" through the market.

And yet he had the unmitigated gall to stand there in front of veteran reporters of the Iraq war--some of whom have been in-country since the invasion of 2003, some of whom were actually Iraqi--and make his ridiculous claims.  When they confronted him in what several media sources refer to as a "testy exchange," he would say only that he and his delegation had "had protection."

Uh-huh.

This is typical of what we have come to expect from this party ever since the days they nominated a marginally intelligent actor to be their standard-bearer.  They knew all they had to do was prop him up on stage sets and he would deliver the stirring script.  When George W. Bush came along, by God they had hit pay dirt.  As Bush's own now-disgruntled speechwriter complained, he had written the words and was SHOCKED I TELL YOU SHOCKED to discover that Bush didn't really BELIEVE any of them.

But they learned, and Karl Rove perfected, the art of simply using stage props and B-roll to hypnotize and mesmerize a gullible public.  Bush at Ground Zero with the megaphone.  Bush on the aircraft carrier:  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.  Bush in front of any number of cheering troops in uniform.

One problem, assholes.

It's wearing thin.

At some point in time, the American people began to be rousted from their sleep, from their five-year stupor of post-traumatic stress.  They began to realize that they were being duped.  And they stopped believing. 

Even the true believers stopped believing.  My, my, you should see them howl about how Bush messed up their lovely little war.

But John McCain ought to know better.

John McCain DOES know better.  And that is what I can't forgive him for.

IS the so-called "surge" working? 

For one thing, anybody who knows anything will tell you that it's too early to tell yet, whether you are fer or agin it.  But the early signs are extremely worrisome.  Whereas yes, in some neighborhoods of Baghdad, there are a few less killings, the bad guys seem to have fled to the smaller villages surrounding Baghdad, and the U.S. Army and Marine Corps troops are engaged in pitched, vicious, and bloody battles in areas long considered reasonably secure.

This does not come as a surprise to the combat troops, by the way.  My son observed first-hand the phenomenon when, after the terrible battle of Fallujah left the town "the most secure in Iraq" for the January, '05 elections, by the time his unit returned in January of '06, they learned that the city was almost as bad as it had been in the beginning.  Bad guys who had fled Fallujah before the battle had snuck back in afterward.

It was the single most frustrating thing about his second deployment, and causes him great grief to this day.

So maybe Bush should have consulted with some of the troops before he escalated the war to "secure Baghdad."

And if John McCain wants a great photo-op, I've got one for him.  There's this guy in the Diyala province--Colonel David Sutherland, commander of the Third Brigade Combat Team of the First Cavalry Division, who has a policy of personally visiting every wounded soldier in his 5,000 man brigade. 

He also visits the morgue, puts his hands on every single dead soldier, tells them that it's okay to go home now, that their buddies will be all right.


Altogether, the unit has seen 39 soldiers die in five months, more in that brief span than the number killed in any brigade that preceded it in yearlong deployments here...

The casualties are taking a tremendous emotional toll on the brigade...For some, grief is compounded because they feel no one back home grasps the perils they endure.  "We've just got a lot of guys dying," said one combat soldier who did not want his name published.  "This country is not getting any better.  Nobody really understands what's going on."

(Col. Sutherland said), "I needed this brigade to go on, and these soldiers needed to go on, for the living...

Laying his hands on the bodies of dead soldiers before they are flown out of Iraq is a crucial part of saying goodbye, he said, a way to tell friends and families he was with them.  "I put my hands on every one of them," he said.
--"A Salute for His Wounded, a Last Touch for His Dead," Richard Oppel, Jr., New York Times, April 2, 2007


And that is the miserable truth.  Why don't you give a press conference about THAT, McCain?  Just think of all the great B-roll you could get of the good colonel pinning the purple hearts to the black body bags!

Then YOUR mission would be accomplished.