McCain Fails Test to Be Legislator, Much Less President

You guys already know about McCain’s seemingly intentional conflation of Iran and Al Qaeda disguised as a serial gaffe (and if you don’t then go read Blue Texan on it, because he’s much funnier than I am).

Since I’m late to the party, all I can add is a link to that Quiz for Lawmakers I devised last year after Silvestre Reyes made the same gaffe. Reyes has gotten much sharper in the interim period–unlike McCain, Reyes can even distinguish an illegal wiretapping program from a legal one.

McCain, however, still fails from the first question of the quiz.

1. The terrorist group Al Qaeda is overwhelmingly made up of what kind of Muslims?

    a. Shiite
    b. Sunni
    c. Kurds
    d. Nation of Islam

 I’m guessing he would flunk most of the rest of the questions, as well.

image_print
21 replies
  1. bmaz says:

    Captain Renault stopped by; you know what he had to say….

    Reyes can even distinguish an illegal wiretapping program from a legal one

    .
    Maybe. I still wholeheartedly suggest that the dude that writes his letters be kept by his side at all times.

  2. Bushie says:

    Why oh why, after the continuing gaffes by McBush on Viagra does the Reuters/Zogby poll show our boy beating either Obama or Clinton. How stupid are the electorate. Gag me!

    • BooRadley says:

      My guess is that it has a lot to do with Barack and Hillary beating each other up.

      Seeing McCain or hearing him talk is very bad for his campaign.

  3. AZ Matt says:

    McCain is getting up there, too many spins around the sun for his mind. And it is hard, really hard running fer President, just ask George.

  4. DefendOurConstitution says:

    If the answer is not:

    – tax cuts
    – 9/11 or
    – stay the course

    then the question is irrelevant. No one should pose any question to McCain that cannot be answered by one or more of the above. Any such attempt should be flagged a bigoted because it would mean that McCain would have to be more competent than Bush.

  5. MarieRoget says:

    As long as the MSM adores McBush & refuses to report this stuff, or blows it off in one news cycle, they can play a big role in getting him elected come Nov. He might be on the verge of senility, but he & his advisors know that the war hero/foreign policy maven/ tough old experienced guy media smokescreen will hide his faults & could win all the marbles for them.

    MSM loves St. John in the same way they were persuaded to love GWB as a candidate. A strategy is needed to curb this in the next few mos. How I wish our Dem candidate was already calling him out on this crap in debates…

  6. Ishmael says:

    OK – if Tim Russert asks Hillary or Obama during a nationally-televised debate who the Foreign Minister of Whateveristan is, and they don’t know, it obviously shows that they are not ready to be President. However, John McCain can’t tell which side is which in a civil war that is the defining struggle of our times (4 or 5 times over a few days), without a scorecard or cribbing from Joe Lieberman, and he is given a pass? Pretty soon they will be hooking him up with a earphone just like Bush, or whispering answers to him like Romney.

    While on the topic of double standards, yesterday there was much umbrage in Dobbsville about the “threat” to the Second Amendment – of course, there has been much less concern about the Fourth Amendment during the Bush years.

  7. Ishmael says:

    For some reason, all I keep hearing about on CNN is that Barack Obama has some kind of a pasta problem – why does the MSM care about his choice of pasta?

    • brendanx says:

      You misheard them. They were saying “pastern” (it’s part of the “horse-race” metaphor).

      • Ishmael says:

        Oh, now it makes sense! I was worried that the media were focussing on completely irrelevant concerns, or applying a different standard to Democratic pastas than Republican pastas – but that would be stupid!

  8. oldtree says:

    It is funny because king g only knew how to talk about “them terrorisms” McSquat tries to show his knowledge and proves he knows no more than the idiot boy.
    Remember, Ronald Reagan thought that GW was a shiftless idiot. Ronal Reagan was a simple, simple man.

    “terrorisms” coined by EW as far as I know, but it is the best damn description of the unknown boogie I have ever heard.

  9. Ishmael says:

    Given the attention given to the condemnations of US foreign policy by Pastor Wright, I fully expect that the media will rise with one voice and demand that McCain denounce the following statement from well known DFH Pope Benedict XVI:

    From the Associated Press:

    “Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his strongest appeals for peace in Iraq on Sunday, days after the body of the kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found near the northern city of Mosul.

    The pope also denounced the five-year-long war, saying it had provoked the complete breakup of Iraqi civilian life.

    “Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!” Benedict said to applause at the end of his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square.”

  10. strider7 says:

    Juan Cole says,
    If you are so ignorant or confused that you think Shiite
    ayatollahs in Tehran are training and arming radical Salafi Sunnis to blow up Shiites in Irac you really should not be president. How long can this bullshit go on?

  11. randiego says:

    Heh heh bmaz, nice timing. I had just jumped in and was reading comments when my ears pricked up!

    It’s not like anyone expected that the fight was over, and the previous victory has whetted the troops appetite for more. I think eventually we might get to the point where bodies are blocking bulldozers. People are VERY passionate about this one.

  12. kspena says:

    a little OT: from Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/…..eda-again/

    cheney pulled a similar mental lapse, gap, gaff two days ago in Iraq at a news conference. When asked if an “operational link” has been found between Iraq and al Qaeda, he answered:

    CHENEY: “Well, this is no operational link. But there was, as I recall from looking at it, extensive links with Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Egyptian Islamic Jihad was the organization headed by Zawahiri, and he merged EIJ with Al Qaeda when he became the deputy director of Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s number two. Now, was that a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Seems to me pretty clear that there was.”….

    QUESTION: So, you think there was a direct link between Al Qaeda…

    CHENEY: You heard what I said. I was very precise.

    QUESTION: But you weren’t.

    CHENEY: OK. Thank you all very much. (END of news conference)

    VP seems to be confusing Zawahiri, Egyptian & OBL’s #2, and Zarqawi, Jordanian, killed in Iraq.

  13. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Glenn Greenwald follows EW’s lede with an examination of McCain’s “brain far” – repetitively conflating “Iran” and “Iraq” and their respective contribution (as opposed to ours) to the Middle East’s chaos and violence.

    One option, McCain hasn’t got a clue, in which case he should drop out now.

    The alternative: McCain is intentionally lying. He’s purposely conflating possible villains into a can of worms so that he and the neocons never have to prove that any one of them actually poses a “clear and present danger” requiring an immediate armed response. Which keeps us in a perpetual state of war, perpetually needing to give away our civil liberties and tax dollars, and never need listen to the highly paid advice of anyone but the AEI.

    Either way, the MSM are “Serious” idiots, doing as much damage as Bush.

  14. freepatriot says:

    question 2 is a little harder

    Wahabi is what ???

    A: Japanese hot sauce
    B: a Mexican Holiday
    C: a Saudi Arabian Religious sect
    D: a Brazilian Motor Scooter

    if you picked A, you ain’t qualified to be president

    If you picked B, and you’re a Senator from Arizona, you’re too stupid to live

    if you picked D, both the A and the B results apply concurrently

Comments are closed.