Even as John McCain makes lowers himself to an elevated level of scumbaggery by falsely accusing Obama of putting politics above national security, it is now manifestly clear that John’s asshole buddy, President Bush, whose campaign tactics McCain is apparently emulating, purposefully put Republican gain over National Security interests by appointing less experienced, less qualified, and less competent lawyers in charge of prosecuting terrorist crimes — because the more experienced, qualified, and competent prosecutors may have had ties to *gasp* Democrats.

And this, mind you, is not in the opinion of the campaign staff of an aged, desperate and mealy-mouthed politico with anger management issues, but according to the inspector general assigned to investigate the whole mess:

Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators, who interviewed 85 people and received information from 300 other job seekers at Justice. Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.

And this:

And in another case cited by the inspector general, Ms. Goodling blocked the hiring of an experienced prosecutor for a senior counter-terrorism position because his wife was active in Democratic politics. The candidate was regarded as “head and shoulders above the other candidates” in the view of officials in the executive office of United States attorneys, but they were forced to take a candidate with much less experience because he was deemed acceptable to Ms. Goodling.

Bear this in mind the next time some sanctimonious, angry, white-haired, lying son of a bitch approves of an ad which accuses your Democratic candidate of playing politics with our nation’s security, and point out who really fails to take law enforcement and prosecuting terrorists seriously.

Is he senile, insane, or has he lost the ability to comprehend simple English? Or maybe he’s gotten used to the media overlooking any batshit crazy thing he happens to say, and he’s just careless.

McCainWorld (via Think Progress): “We were greeted as liberators”

Reality: Over 4,000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, many maimed for life. Between 400-1600 attacks against US and coalition forces every week, for the past 240 weeks — but we’re talking about attacks against US and coalition troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands. And McCain calls this. . .

. . . being “greeted as liberators.

McCain seems to inhabit a fantasy world where words mean only what he says they mean, and where reality too is supposed to bend to whatever he happens to say at the time.

John McCain electrifies his supporters.

HT to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s.

So Barack Obama gives a speech in Berlin, and 200,000 enthusiastic people show up to hear his speech and cheer him.

International Herald Tribune: Obama gets pop star reception in Berlin

Senator Barack Obama stood before a sea of people here Thursday evening and issued a call for cooperation, imploring America and Europe to bridge differences and rekindle old alliances in an effort to restore global stability and better confront existing and unforeseen threats.

~~~

Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who is on a weeklong international tour, delivered his address at the base of the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, a sprawling park in the center of the city.

He looked out toward the Brandenburg Gate, where President Ronald Reagan implored the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” and end the Cold War, and spoke to crowd that the German News Agency DPA estimated at 200,000 people.

The response to Obama has been so warm that the coordinator for German-American relations in the Foreign Ministry here, Karsten Voigt, has tried to scale back expectations. He reminded Germans in interview after interview that Obama would have to support positions unpopular with the German public, like a stronger presence engaged in more fighting for the Bundeswehr, the German army, in Afghanistan.

First and foremost, Obama is popular because he is not Bush, who is wildly unpopular in Germany. Asked why they support Obama, his opposition to the Iraq War usually comes up first.

The excitement in Germany over Obama has grown steadily through the Democratic primaries, reaching its peak with his address herwe Thursday in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park. Obama’s photograph was splashed across the front pages of German newspapers. Leaflets advertising the speech with quotes from Presisent John F. Kennedy — who came to this divided city at the height of the Cold War and urged those who did not believe in freedom: “Let them come to Berlin” — fluttered in the street.

Reaction from Grumpy McCain:

“”Well, I’d love to give a speech in Germany … a political speech or a speech that maybe the German people would be interested in. . . ” “But I would much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for the office of the presidency.”

Or, shorter John McCain:

Hmmmmpph!

If I were Senator Greenscreenspeech, the last thing I would do is draw attention to Senator Obama’s speeches.

McCain was so busy criticizing Obama for giving a speech outside the United States (ironically after his own challenge to go to Iraq and Afghanistan spurred Obama’s trip) . . .

“I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States,” McCain told O’Donnell. “But that’s a judgment that Sen. Obama and the American people will make.”

. . . that he forgot that he himself gave a speech paid for by his campaign “outside of the country” just last month:

However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada — to the Economic Club of Canada — in which he applauded NAFTA’s successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain’s trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign.

One gets the impression that McCain is so desperate to fling whatever monkey shit he can lay hands on at Obama, that he is failing to notice he’s mostly succeeding in spreading a thick layer primate crap all over himself.

It would almost be worth it to the Obama camp to schedule a quick trip to Prague to see if he could elicit yet another reference from John-boy to the non-existent country of Czechoslovakia.

And another one: per atrios, Andrea Mitchell is reporting that McCain is criticizing Obama for being overseas while voters are struggling at home. Which, Duncan points out, means McCain forgot not only that he personally challenged Obama to go overseas to Iraq, but also that he flew to Columbia and Mexico earlier this month to showcase his mad foreign policy skilz.

Astronaut Edgar Martin says “I Want to Believe”:

Moon-walker claims alien contact cover-up

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.
And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

~~~

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

“I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”

After claiming teh Surge, which was announced in January 2007 and implemented beginning in March 2007 was responsible for the Anbar Awakening which was already a marked success 7 months earlier, John McCain explains that “he knew that” the surge didn’t really take place until months after the Awakening, but claimed that “components” of teh Surge were implemented before its architect was assigned command, and before the surge itself was conceived, announced or implemented, and that these precocious “components” were still somehow responsible for the Awakening:

McCain asserted he knew that and didn’t commit a gaffe. “A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. … I’m not sure people understand that `surge’ is part of a counterinsurgency.”

Actually, the “Surge” is short for “Troop Surge,” the decision to send additional combat brigades to Iraq in 2007. And the Penatagon just announced, with the withdrawal of the last additional combat brigade, that “the Surge is over,” making it clear that the surge refers to increased troop levels implemented in 2007, not any “counterinsurgency” strategy implemented in 2006, as McCain tries to dissemble. Unless, of course, McCain contends that we are no longer conducting a counterinsurgency in Iraq. In which case, our troops can leave now.

One of the least appealing and most ruinous facets of Bush’s Presidency is his inability to admit any mistake, no matter how obvious the mistake or unavoidable the admission. McCain seems to share this mania for claiming perfection, bristling at any suggestion that he is in error or out of touch, no matter how erroneous or out of touch he is. Four more years of errors unaccompanied by any capacity for self-reflection or acknowledgment of mistakes is hardly a blueprint for repairing the damage done by Bush, or the errors of his policies.

McCain, of course, apparently doesn’t recognize those errors or the damage caused by them, which is hardly a comfort either.

Steve Benen:

I don’t doubt that this is terribly embarrassing for him — the surge is his signature issue; presumably he should know what the surge is — but by trying to retroactively redefine the meaning of unambiguous words, he makes an embarrassing mistake a humiliating scandal. The smart move would be to admit the error and move on. But not this guy — he’s fallen in a hole and keeps on digging.

~~~~

And where does that leave us? McCain’s argument effectively boils down to this: “The surge is whatever I say it is, on any given day.”

Indeed, McCain’s quibbling attempts to deny his mistake seems curiouser and curiouser the more one delves into it.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master - that’s all.”
– Through the Looking Glass

MORE: Obisidian Wings also greets its readers with Carrollian analogies — great minds and all that. (via Balloon Juice)

From Ben Smith. While the Bush Administration hurriedly pushed out a statement through Centcom claiming that Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal which appeared in Der Spiegel was the result of a “mistranslation,” there’s one wee little problem: Der Spiegel has a policy of issuing transcripts to interviewees, like al Maliki, and allowing them to correct any mistakes prior to publication.

BushCo’s attempt to brush al Maliki’s statement under the rug reminds me of the indignant declaration of the title character in Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy:

Ah, you’ll have to learn to tell a lie properly. What’s the good of a lie if it’s seen through? When I tell a lie, no one can tell it from the gospel truth.

And that’s in English, so no translation needed.

“For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen.”
— George Orwell, 1984

Another Mission Accomplished Moment for the Bush administration, although we have 147,000 troops left in Iraq now, as opposed to the 130,000 troops before teh Surge:

The U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq that President George W. Bush ordered last year has ended after the last of five additional combat brigades left the country, a U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The remaining troops from that brigade departed over the weekend, leaving just under 147,000 American soldiers in Iraq, the spokesman said.

“The final elements of the surge brigade have now left, getting out a few days ahead of schedule,” he said.

The U.S. military had 20 combat brigades in Iraq at its peak in 2007, with troop levels around 160,000-170,000.

The current number is well above the 130,000 troops in Iraq when Bush ordered the deployment in January 2007. The Pentagon said last February it expected 140,000 troops to be in Iraq once the five brigade drawdown had finished.

So. . . . teh Surge is supposed to improve conditions in Iraq so our troops could come home. . . and was such a smashing success, we end up with 10-17,000 more than when we started.