Baghdad McCain and Tagalong Lindsey Graham

Remember Baghdad Bob and his attempts to spin reality as American troops were overrunning Baghdad? Now we have Baghdad McCain with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tagging along. My wife's jaw dropped open this morning as CNN showed Sen. John McCain talking about how easy it was to walk around Baghdad; he apparently was at a press conference in the well-protected Green Zone when he told us this. I told her to wait a few hours; things are not like they were three years ago when the Bush Administration and its Republican friends could still spin just about any story they wanted. Sure enough, even the major networks caught John McCain on this one. Thinkprogress was quickly on the story:

Sen. John McCain strolled briefly through an open-air market in Baghdad today in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq.

But, NBC’s Nightly News reports that McCain’s neighborhood stroll was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

Three helicopters. Two gunships. A hundred soldiers. And it sure looked like a bulletproof vest to me (click on Thinkprogress to see the picture). Yep, you and me can just walk in downtown Baghdad anytime we want, in broad daylight, for a half hour or so, in one of the safer neighborhoods, if we had McCain's protection force. *sigh*

I miss the old, reasonably honest John McCain. The new John McCain has become an embarrassment. Much of what passes for the Republican leadership these days is an embarrassment.