\jeff{krimmel}

Now That’s a Flip-Flop

I recently watched the featured video at TheRealMcCain.com, and let me tell you, if you don’t know if you’ve seen a political flip-flop yet, you should check out that site. The video, titled JohnMcCain versus John McCain, exposes Senator McCain’s flip-flops on topics such as the war on Iraq, the confederate flag, the religious right, and gay marriage, all using his own words. I found the war on Iraq bit to be particularly damning. Here are the four choice quotes:

I believe that success will be fairly easy. (9/24/2002, CNN)

I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time. (9/29/2002, CNN)

The American people … were led to believe that this would be some kind of a day at the beach which many of us, uh, fully understood from the very beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking. (8/22/2006, CNN)

I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough. And those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of an easy task, then I’m sorry they were mistaken. Maybe they didn’t know what they were voting for. (1/4/2007, MSNBC)

Now that’s a flip-flop. It looks like Senator McCain was for “the war is easy” before he was against it.

And here is part of the reason why support for the war is at an all time low and dropping. It’s not just the president who can’t admit that things aren’t working in Iraq and that the reality just isn’t matching the expectations that were laid forth before the war began. Almost every vocal supporter of the war before it was launched is now turning into a revisionist historian. The voters may be unsatisfied with how the war is going, but the voters simply expected too much, too quickly. The wise members of the administration and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress knew from the beginning this war would be tough and we would lose thousands of American lives.

After all, it was these prescient war supporters that were visiting CNN saying things like, “It is possible that Iraq will try to force our troops to fight house to house in the middle of cities - on its turf, not ours - where precision-guided missiles are of little use.” It’s not like they were spouting things from the hip like, “I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.”

Oh, wait a minute. It was a war supporter who said that last bit. But who said the previous one, the one about our troops fighting in the middle of cities in Iraq where our strengths and advantages are more effectively neutralized? Right, that was Howard Dean.

So not only were the pre-war predictions of John McCain and most of the Republicans flat out wrong. The pre-war predictions of Howard Dean and most of the Democrats were flat out right. And yet President Bush and the Republicans are still taken seriously regarding their opinions on the way in which this war should be waged. Go figure.