Hitting McCain Where it Hurts Most

By Eric Pfeiffer | March 19, 2008 3:00 PM | | Comments (0)

In politics, one of the problems with professing an expertise in anything, is that a simple misstatement or gaffe will be flipped into a sign of incompetence by your opponents. That's the case today, where liberal bloggers are all over John McCain's misstatement during a press conference in Jordan that Iran is training al Qaeda operatives and sending them back into Iraq. As was widely reported, McCain was corrected by Joe Lieberman, who is traveling with him on a foreign policy tour of the region.

Daily Kos diarist Smintheus says:

This isn't just a minor slip. This betrays a profound lack of foreign policy expertise, a shallowness so extreme that if the remark had been made by Barack Obama, say, it would have called into question his viability as a presidential candidate.
But some conservative bloggers and publications like The Weekly Standard are saying McCain was right the first time. Pointing to the 9/11 Commission report as evidence, Powerline's John Hinderaker adds:

It is the AP (and other media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times) that fails to understand the relationship between Iran and Sunni terrorists, not John McCain. The AP's statement that there is "no evidence that al-Qaida has benefited from Iranian assistance" is flatly wrong, and shows a breathtaking level of ignorance.

Tags: Blogger Reactions, Iraq, John McCain

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