Nothing important happened today

by smintheus [courtesy of Daily Kos]

We talk so much about Bush III that we've perhaps paid too little attention to George III.

Shambling, fitful, and proudly belligerent, George III is the archetypal clueless monarch, always and stubbornly out of touch with reality. On July 4, 1776, he famously wrote in his diary:

Nothing important happened today.

That's brought to mind for me almost every time John McCain speaks about Iraq. It's as if to McCain the actual conditions in Iraq were as obscure and unknowable as the progress of an insurrection in the colonies had been to the Court of St. James during the eighteenth century - when news actually took weeks to cross the Atlantic. The disconnect is stunning.

To take just the latest example, on May 29 McCain once again painted a sunny picture of progress that bore little relation to the facts.

So I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet...

He was speaking on a day that saw a deadly suicide attack on police in Mosul and bombs directed against an American outpost in the city. At the same time, thousands of Iraqis were about to march in Sadr City and in Basra and other cities against the US occupation of their country. "Quiet" is just plain out of touch with reality.

And the utter cluelessness on display in McCain's claim about troop levels has attracted ample derision. So ample that his campaign is reduced to complaining that McCain's critics are nitpicking over verb tenses. Because in McCain's world, today's pipe dream just hasn't had time yet to succeed. The present is always and forever the future perfect.

Nothing important will have happened today.

Like George III, McCain is defined by the gaps in his knowledge and awareness, by what he fails to perceive about his own signature war. Like George, he fancies that the war can be won simply by prolonging and intensifying the same failed policies.

One thing we should concede to John McCain: There's plenty of evidence of tense-confusion. He never appears to be living in the here and now. Heck, even when he drops in to tour the war-zone McCain comes away with the same ridiculous preconceptions - almost as if he hadn't been present at all.

Maybe we've been wrong to take McCain at his own estimation, that he's a man of the 20th century. Sometimes he looks more like an 18th century emperor.