Is McCain getting Senile or is he just making shit up? - PART 2
Emerging Wackjob and presidential hopeful John McCain took a trip to Iraq to defend his comments from last week on how it was now safe to walk some of Baghdad’s streets (see March 30).
To press his point he traveled in an armored convoy from the airport to the Green Zone rather than the normal means, by helicopter. He also wandered around a busy market (in full body armor) with General Petraeus to prove how rosy and wonderful life has become there since the troop surge.
McCain said that the security crackdown in Iraq was proving successful and that Americans lacked a “full picture’ of the progress.
Well if by progress, you mean “killing more Iraqis and US soldiers to satisfy the deranged visions of a handful of war mongering nut jobs until their time is up,” then the numbers support McCain:
Iraqis killed in February: 1806 (64.5/day)
Iraqis killed in March: 2078 (67/day)
Middle East expert Juan Cole, from the University of Michigan, responded:
“He said that only three days after the US embassy issued an order that personnel are to wear ‘personal protective equipment’ when moving between buildings inside the Green Zone!
He said it the day two suicide belt bombs were found inside the Green Zone. So he could ride in an armored car in from the airport. That’s the big achievement?
…Look, I lived in the midst of a civil war in the late 1970s in Beirut. I know exactly what it looks and smells like. The inexperienced often assume that when a guerrilla war or a civil war is going on, life grinds to a standstill. Not so. People go shopping for food. They drive where they need to go as long as they don’t hear that there is a firefight in that area. They go to work if they still have work. Life goes on. It is just that, unexpectedly, a mortar shell might land near you. Or the person ahead of you in line outside the bakery might fall dead, victim of a sniper’s bullet. The bazaars are bustling some days (all the moreso because it is good to stock up on supplies the days when the violence isn’t so bad). So nothing that John McCain saw in Baghdad on Sunday meant a damn thing. Not a goddamn thing.
It makes my blood boil.”