On Sunday morning, CNN will interview not-President John McCain, as though he were America’s most important sage.

CNN’s State of the Union: “In an exclusive interview this Sunday, John speaks with Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, about the war in Afghanistan, the latest on the health care debate, and much more.”

Are they serious? McCain knows (and cares) even less about health care reform than he admitted knowing or caring about the economy. And one can only imagine what the “much more” refers to.

But it’s a wonder the media are still asking John McCain or his buddies Graham (on NBC’s MTP) or Lieberman (WSJ op-ed with Graham) about Afghanistan. Frank Rich explains why, and delivers a blistering, well-deserved condemnation of the arrogant “sage” who’s been wrong on everything:

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess . . .

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

All the links are Rich’s, and he isn’t done, proceeding to blister McCain’s two buddies as well.

It is a measure of the silliness of cable/network talking head shows that they think anyone with that record still deserves to be asked his opinion rather than offer a long and humble apology. But read through the guests and panelists from Elliot’s Sunday Talking Heads post; asking silly people who’ve been wrong time and again, and whose errors led to thousands of other people’s deaths, is about 75 percent of what we get on a good Sunday.

“Why, oh, why can’t we have a better media?” — Brad DeLong

Video h/t to Think Progress, Discussion Afghanistan, McCain dodges question on whether we should have invaded Iraq

Tags: ,