Gaffeman

There's a bunch of buzz on the internets about yet another McCain gaffe. Apparently he said that it's "not that important" when the troops come home from Iraq. Of course his campaign is claiming he was taken out of context and all the usual nonsense. Josh Marshall makes total sense out of this latest foot-in-mouth moment for McCain:

Sometimes these references by McCain are treated as gaffes but they're not. This is what McCain believes: that we should have a long-term troop presence in Iraq to guarantee the survival of a pro-U.S. government and assert power in the region. That's not a crazy position. That's the position of the current administration. That's why we're currently trying to secure an agreement with the Iraqis to ratify that goal. The problem isn't that McCain's position is incomprehensible. It's just not popular. Most Americans think reducing casualties is important too. But they'd like to do both -- reduce casualties and leave too.

The problem for the McCain campaign is that he keeps stumbling into clear statements of his actual policy, which is close to lethal since the vast majority of Americans disagree with his policy and Iraq is virtually the only thing he's running on. The context the McCain campaign keeps trying to put forward after the fact is what they wished he'd said rather than what he did. And even that, when you push deep, isn't that different from McCain's actual policy, which is that he doesn't think we should be leaving Iraq for years to come, most likely decades.

Precisely. The GOP is going to have to work quite hard to put lipstick on that pig*

*assumes no attack on Iran.