John McCain Fights New Battle: Now He Wages War Against Reality

Hey, what can I say? From Glenn Greenwald:

John McCain was interviewed by Bill Bennett yesterday and this is the claim McCain made about American public opinion on the Iraq war:

[McCain]: I reject the notion that all Americans, or the majority of Americans just want us out of Iraq. Joe Lieberman would not have been re-elected in a very liberal state if that were the case.BB: Right.

This "reasoning" has become a standard line for McCain and his dwindling band of war supporting comrades in order to argue that Americans really do, deep down, support their pro-war views. It is hard to overstate just how dishonest and incoherent it is.

Let's leave to the side the utterly inane notion -- advanced now by McCain -- that public opinion should be discerned not by looking at polls which are scientifically designed to gauge public opinion on specific issues, but instead, by trying to mystically interpret isolated election results from a single state. McCain obviously wants to find a murkier and inference-dependent method for assessing public opinion because the scientific poll method conclusively demonstrates that his views on the war are rejected by Americans with such overwhelming force that it renders him a fringe extremist.

But let's indulge McCain's alternative method of divining the meaning of election results in order to determine Americans' views on the war. Last November, four Republican incumbent Senators, all of whom were steadfast supporters of the Iraq war, were booted out of office in red states -- George Allen in Virginia, Conrad Burns in Montana, Jim Talent in Missouri, and Mike DeWine in Ohio. Those states are red to varying degrees, but they are all red enough to have each voted twice for George Bush for President.