McCain: “Is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted?”
Interesting 1998 interview with John McCain conducted by Jason Vest for Mother Jones (ellipsis in original):
You not only have had combat experience in Vietnam, but you were also a prisoner of war. When you look at terrorism right now, with people like Osama bin Laden, do you have any reservations about watching strikes like that?
You could say, Look, is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted? Most of us have never heard of him before. And where there is a parallel with Vietnam is: What’s plan B? What do we do next? We sent our troops into Vietnam to protect the bases. Lyndon Johnson said, Only to protect the bases. Next thing you know…. Well, we’ve declared to the terrorists that we’re going to strike them wherever they live. That’s fine. But what’s next? That’s where there might be some comparison.
Not that many people were ahead of the curve on al-Qaeda in the 1990s, and we see here that John McCain was no exception. 9/11 made a lot of people think, though, that we should get more serious about fighting al-Qaeda. It made McCain think that we should invade Iraq.
30 Responses to “McCain: “Is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted?””
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September 30th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
What a maverick.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
And he still doesn’t want to kill bin Laden. Obama will, McCain won’t. A vote for McCain is a vote for bin Laden.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Yes, but 9/11 was still Bill Clinton’s fault.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
If I don’t see a bastardized form of this quote in Obama ads by the end of the week, and Obama himself doesn’t bring it up in the next debate, then I’m asking for my money back from that campaign. “Is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted?” I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Even in 1998, he should have known better.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
If the Democrat said this it would be prominently featured in an attack ad, with the Four Horsemen riding in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.
I would say to the Obama campaign: leave this alone. It can only distract from the economy.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Wait, wait, wait.
Isn’t McCain decrying MISSION CREEP in that interview?
It’s sort of like if you invaded a country to get rid of its WMDs.
In McCain’s words:
That’s fine. But what’s next?
September 30th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Invade Iraq, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere. Get it straight.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[ominous chord]
“Bin Laden strikes. Hundreds are killed, many on U.S. soil. And John McCain’s response?
‘Is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that’s depicted?’
John McCain. Not ready to lead.”
September 30th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Errrmmmm, just wondering if Jeff Zucker & Co are representative of all your Obamists:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW9b0xr06qA
Because then that would be downright creepy…
September 30th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Holy crap! Why isn’t that line in every single one of the Obama campaign commercials?
September 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
McCain’s answer doesn’t count–the question was obviously gotcha!!! journalism.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
That has got to be the best pic of McCain I’ve ever seen.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
What if Obama had said that?
October 1st, 2008 at 6:21 am
The Kenya/Tanzania embassy bombings took place on August 7, 1998. This interview took place in mid-September of that year, according to the link.
If McCain hadn’t known much about bin Laden before August 7, I could see that. But for a guy who boasts about his national security cred to have been talking so ignorantly about bin Laden 5-6 weeks later is really pretty pathetic.
At a minimum, you’d think that after the embassy bombings, he’d have gotten a staffer to write up a 3-page summary of what we knew about this guy, that he could read on the plane when he got bored with the in-flight magazine.
And this is his supposed strong suit, his supposed area of expertise.
Pathetic.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:01 am
Oh, Jesus Christ. I knew who bin Laden was in 1998. I remember watching the Denzel Washington movie and thinking that the terrorist sheik character was clearly a fictionalized version of him. And I was 19.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:02 am
(The Denzel Washington movie The Siege, that is.)
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
This suggests McCain was critical of or opposed to the cruise missile counterstrikes. Is there more info about that somewhere?
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