We know the political press is willing to carry water for McCain.
When Democrats brought attention to McCain's willingness to stay in Iraq indefinitely, the traditional political press quickly came to his rescue.
Remember Ambinder back a month ago?
Democrats and allies are jumping on John McCain for telling NBC's Matt Lauer that "it's not important" when troops return from Iraq. Period. There's no because. There's almost never a because when one side seizes on the comments of another. The context makes it clear that McCain is reiterating his position that the presence of troops isn't the issue; instead, it's the casualties they receive.
McCain says a peaceful, Korea-like presence is possible in Iraq. But there's no explanation of how, and no one seems concerned with asking.
And this week, the press seems to again buy McCain's "magic wand" approach.
Says Josh Marshall:
Today John McCain is getting lots of press for his new plan to balance the budget during his first term -- what can only be called an extraordinarily ambitious promise. The first pick was from Mike Allen's piece late last night in The Politico.Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.
But here's the thing. McCain doesn't have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he's going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn't agree to give them a write up.
How does McCain plan to balance the budget? Why, by winning the Fight Against Terror, of course! From today's Politico:
The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.
TPM went to the McCain for a response to this..."plan," and got this back:
It's pretty straightforward, as we win, costs will go down with a smaller footprint over time, and those savings will go to deficit reduction. It's really the logical extension of Senator McCain's position as articulated in the 2013 speech. Achieving success in Iraq would obviously lead to reduced expenditures on the effort.
McCain will waive his magic wand, you see, and win the war against "Islamic extremists" peacefully. Then he'll use that leftover money to balance the budget. McCain might even end with a surplus! And then he'll take the money from that surplus, and he'll spend it to cure cancer. And then with all the additional survivors of cancer, we can harness the brainpower to invent a time machine! And then we'll go back to 2002, and decide that going to war in Iraq was a stupid idea in the first place.
And then the war in Iraq will be over.
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