All Together Now: John McCain is a Douchebag

The Maverick apparently figures he might as well pick up W's 28% remainder for his own. Why else would he work one of Bush's favorite lines into his latest appeal for 40,000 more troops in Baghdad and Anbar Province?

Without a troop increase, McCain said at the news conference, "the results are going to be inevitable, in my view" — a defeat for America and for its Iraqi allies that would create a terrorist haven that could be used as a base for attacks in the United States.

He contrasted the situation with the Vietnam War, saying, "when we came home, the war was over." But now, he said, Iraq's Islamic militants "will follow us home" if the American effort fails.

The ISG report made it clear that Al Qaeda accounts for only a small percentage of the attacks against US forces in Iraq. AQ will be gunning for us no matter what we do in Iraq. The big guns over there, though--the Shiite and Sunni militias and death squads--are highly unlikely to hop on boats and planes to bring their fight to America. Once we're out of their way, they'll continue on with the deadly serious business of blowing each other up.

McCain is a fearmonger who is all too happy to exploit people's ignorance in order to pick up votes. He--and everyone else who bleats the "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" mantra--need only look to Afghanistan for a reality check. We actually were fighting AQ and the Taliban there, and when we shifted most of the effort away from there to a different there, they didn't exactly follow us in droves. They simply regrouped and re-established their dominion over much of the territory a couple hundred US and coalition guys gave their lives to drive them out of.

But McCain said personal ambition would not guide his Iraq policy.

Oh. My bad. He is distancing himself from the Bush model after all. Shite.