The Outrage of the Day comes to us from Josh Marshall, a pretty even keeled fellow. John McCain said this to reporters.
“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.
Says Josh, “[I]f Obama is going to be in Iraq this weekend, this is a major breach on McCain’s part.” Why? Because operational security (OPSEC) for VIPs traveling to dangerous areas involves blurring the details of trips so as to make it harder for the bad guys to do them harm. Josh concedes, “Hypothetically, maybe McCain was just guessing.” He continues, ” But even so it would still be a serious lapse of judgment on his part.”
Hilary Bok agrees and goes further:
This is not just another screwup from McCain. It is very, very serious. There are things you are just Not Supposed To Talk About. This is one of them. If McCain doesn’t have the common sense, the decency, and the discipline not to talk about them, that’s a very serious problem. Since I’m not willing to assume he did this out of malice, I have to conclude that he just let this slip. But if he were President, we would need to count on him not to let things like this slip. Apparently, we can’t. And that’s a very big deal.
Warren Street agrees: “Senator John McCain just seriously compromised the safety and security of Senator Barack Obama and everyone traveling with him–plus any military members or private security personnel assigned to protect him.” Further, “I don’t believe McCain wanted any harm to come to Obama or anyone else–I believe McCain wanted to keep Obama from going to Iraq because the visuals of Obama being greeted by raucous troops and of Obama actually speaking extemporaneously and knowing what the hell he’s talking about would be a devastating comparison to McCain’s Grandpa Simpson routine as of late…“ [Emphasis in original.]
Mark Kleiman and others, meanwhile, are pushing the “McCain is senile” meme.
Oh, please.
The Obama campaign has been touting this trip for weeks. We’ve all had a pretty good idea of the timeline. Google and Google News are flooded with thousands of copies of the same wire reports on the above gaffe, making pinpointing older accounts difficult. But, for example, NRO’s Pete Hegseth, writing on July 14th, criticized Obama’s release of his Iraq plan thusly: “It strikes me that only someone who is signaling no interest in consulting with commanders on the ground would spell out his ‘plan’ for Iraq just one week before he visits the country for the first time in 918 days.” We knew that the Iraq and Afghanistan trip would take place in conjunction with a European tour, including a speech originally announced for outside the Brandenburg Gate but moved to the Victory Column in Berlin. Every story on this written last week said said trip would be “next week.”
This ain’t no state secret, folks.
Obama, by the way, landed in Afghanistan this morning. I trust it’s kosher to mention that, what with all the news coverage.
