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Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 11:53:28 AM EST

Bomb, Bombs Away! - Did Fox's Britt

Hume
Just Imply McCain Has Early Alzheimer's ?
By Bruce Wilson
America has already passed through the perilous straights of a US President, Ronald
Reagan, now widely acknowledged to have been suffering from Alzheimer's and Britt
Hume, in downplaying John McCain's claim that Iran was training Al-Qaeda as
[merely?] "a senior moment" (hat tip to Think Progress) has raised the specter that
the America presidency might again be in the hands of a man with declining mental
capacity. This is troubling because last April 2, 2006 McCain told Tim Russert, on
Meet The press, that a US war with Iran "could be Armageddon" and then, about a
year later, McCain was courting Pastor John Hagee, an politicized evangelical leader
who had formed a lobbying group to precipitate Armageddon. In 2003, in fact,
Hagee's ministry was marketing a 3-volume videotape series, of three Hagee
sermons, which declared that a US invasion of Iraq would destabilize the Middle East
and bring on the "final conflict". Hagee has now moved on to advocating a US attack
on Iran which, per Hagee, will advance the pastor's Armageddon-based foreign policy
goals.
John McCain's now infamous singing of "Bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of
the Beach Boys' hit "Barbara Anne" has pickled up an even more ominous cast given
the Arizona Senator has repeatedly displayed confusion about the most basic
sectarian division in Islam, the Sunni-Shiite split. As I've recently written at Talk To
Action:
In his 2008 presidential bid, John McCain has been running, in essence,
on a 'religious war vs. Islam' platform but Senator McCain, in a
comment the Senator made in Jordan during his Mideast tour, appears
to be unclear on the distinction between Sunni & Shia Muslims, reports
the Washington Post's campaign blog.
As Cameron W. Barr and Michael D. Shear report,
Sen. John McCain, traveling in the Middle East to promote his foreign
policy expertise, misidentified in remarks Tuesday which broad
category of Iraqi extremists are allegedly receiving support from Iran.
He said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was
supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda...
...McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him
continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives "taking al-Qaeda
into Iran, training them and sending them back."
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was "common knowledge and has
been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and
receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well
known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph
Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and
whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm
sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."
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The mistake threatened to undermine McCain's argument that his

decades of foreign policy experience make him the natural choice to
lead a country at war with terrorists.
Apparently, reports ThinkProgress.org (story has audio clip of McCain's blunder), Mr
McCain repeated the same mistake, last night, on Hugh Hewitt's radio show - thus
indicating his statements in Jordan were probably not a fluke. John McCain seems
uncertain about the most basic sectarian division among Muslims, the Sunni-Shiite
split. It's analogous, roughly, to the Catholic/Protestant split and McCain's confusion
is, frankly, bizarre given his claims to foreign policy expertise. In addition, John
McCain's basic premise, that the primary cause of world terrorism is "militant Islam"
has been challenged by Department of Defense-funded research, from a University of
Chicago academic, whose work suggests a the most important factor driving suicide
terrorism is nationalism.
Senator McCain has also been endorsed by a Christian leader, Pastor John Hagee,
whose organization "Christians United For Israel" has been charged with choosing, as
its original organizational logo, an image of Jerusalem's Temple Mount from which the
3rd holiest structure to Muslims worldwide, the Dome of The Rock, had been
airbrushed out - thus symbolically depicting what the state of Israel would consider to
be a major and disastrous act of terrorism.