McCain: It’s Academic

On “Hardball” the other day, John McCain was confronted a bit with his record of siding with the Bush White House on Iraq policy. McCain didn’t want to talk about the past.

“We can look back at the past and argue about whether we should have gone to war or not, whether we should have invaded or not, and that’s a good academic argument. But we’re there now, and the question is, is what we do in the future.”

“Academic argument.” Holding leading senators accountable for their votes is “academic.” Looking for some sense of responsibility from those who seek the presidency is “academic.”

As Yglesias put it, “Over 4,000 people died in this academic arguments. People need to use the term “trillion” to express its fiscal cost. And, obviously, the question about whether or not it was a good idea speaks to some important points of doctrine and theory. This isn’t like quibbling over some vote on some amendment back in 1983, it was the biggest national security policy decision of the current era.”

Atrios added, “Proving he’s truly at one with the Village, John McCain thinks it’s just an academic question of whether it was a good decision to invade another country, create a situation in which hundreds of thousands of citizens of that country die, cost a trillion dollars and 4000+ and counting US lives. Because the Village is an accountability free zone, where as long as you agree with the serious people you can never be wrong, and even if you were it doesn’t matter so stop mentioning it.”

That’s clearly right, but I think this is a uniquely annoying problem for McCain.

The thing that’s always struck me as odd about McCain’s campaign pitch is that it only works if you refuse to look below the surface.

McCain, for example, goes to great lengths to emphasize his past. He’s running on his “experience.” The entire pitch so far has been based on a backwards-looking approach — look at his family history, his military service during Vietnam, and his quarter-century in Congress.

It sounds great, until we actually want to scrutinize this experience, at which point the past is an “academic exercise,” and the only thing that matters is “the future.”

The argument, in a nutshell, is that McCain’s past matters more than anything else, except when he decides it shouldn’t… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Carpetbagger Report>

Such arguments are good fodder for the GOP faithful, spoon fed intellectual dross by Faux Noise.  But what ‘academic’ position should we expect from McFlipFlop, who would have graduated at the bottom of his class, even if he had attended Dementia University.