It's a question that has needed asking for a long time, and now Slate has finally put it into words: why do Americans consider John McCain knowledgeable on foreign policy?
It took a McCain interview with Katie Couric that had been edited to omit a fairly major error, an enterprising blogger noticed, for the Republican's folly to become national news.
But now that the story has broken, it is getting bigger by the second. McCain claimed to Couric that the so-called Sunni Muslim "Anbar awakening" movements had arisen in response to George Bush's sending 30,000 more troops to Iraq - the so-called "surge" strategy. The only problem is that US commanders began singling out Anbar months before the "surge" began.
When reporters pressed McCain to clarify his curious concept of time, he defended himself thus.
What the Bush administration calls "the surge" was actually "made up of a number of components", some of which began before the president's order for more troops.
Did the real "surge" begin in McCain's head?
