Say Anything Blog

Young Turks host Cenk Uygur noticed that his confusion about the timeline of the “surge” in Iraq wasn’t McCain’s only gaffe in his interview with CBS news this week. McCain seemed to forget the war in Afghanistan preceded the invasion of Iraq; either that or he didn’t think it was a major conflict.

“The fact is we had four years of failed policy. ... We were losing the war in Iraq. The consequences of failure. The defeat of the United States of America in the first major conflict since 9/11 would have had devastating impacts throughout the region and the world,” McCain told CBS anchor Katie Couric.

“Was Afghanistan not major enough for him?” Uygur asks.

Like his previous flub, CBS edited this misstatement from its broadcast. The full version of the interview, which only aired online, also saw McCain wrongly crediting the surge with sparking the “Anbar Awakening,” in which tribal leaders began to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Anbar Awakening gaffe was edited out and replaced with McCain’s scurrilous attack accusing Democratic nominee Barack Obama of caring more about winning the election than winning a war. Crooks & Liars notes that bit of editing violated CBS’s own Standards & Practices because they edited in an answer from an earlier question and changed the meaning of McCain’s statement.