Over at OTB, [1] James notes a pattern I started taking note of last night:
The Outrage of the Day comes to us from Josh Marshall [2], a pretty even keeled fellow. John McCain said this [3] to reporters.
“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.
Says Josh, “[I]f Obama is going to be in Iraq this weekend, this is a major breach on McCain’s part.” Why? Because operational security (OPSEC) for VIPs traveling to dangerous areas involves blurring the details of trips so as to make it harder for the bad guys to do them harm. Josh concedes, “Hypothetically, maybe McCain was just guessing.” He continues, ” But even so it would still be a serious lapse of judgment on his part.”
Hilary Bok [4] agrees and goes further:
This is not just another screwup from McCain. It is very, very serious. There are things you are just Not Supposed To Talk About. This is one of them. If McCain doesn’t have the common sense, the decency, and the discipline not to talk about them, that’s a very serious problem. Since I’m not willing to assume he did this out of malice, I have to conclude that he just let this slip. But if he were President, we would need to count on him not to let things like this slip. Apparently, we can’t. And that’s a very big deal.
I thought Obama was so very popular that none of the people in question would want to kill him. Is this a tacit admission on the part of these leftists that there are still threats to be dealt with in region that talking won’t solve? Amazing how these little snippets of truth leak out.