See Through Their Lies

One of the reasons I started my band, The Surge, was because the troop surge in Iraq had an alchemic effect on U.S. political discourse. What began as a last-best-hope policy hail-mary became totemic, magic, legend. The right embraced it as a cudgel — cynically at first, but then it became the stuff of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, enthralling those who sought to wield it. Think G-Money in New Jack city. Against this sort of stuff, mere journalism shows its limits, so you might as well write songs.

McCain is a perfect example of this. His faith in the surge — either as political salvation or, maybe, actual national redemption in Iraq, from his perspective — is such that he cannot believe the reality that the Anbar Awakening predated the surge. Yglesias and I noted this yesterday. At HuffPost, Seth Colter Wallis reminded us that McCain himself once understood the chronology. Democracy Arsenal’s Ilan Goldenberg found an essay about the Awakening written by then-Col Sean MacFarland at the dawn of the surge. Ilan writes, with characteristic precision, "John McCain has simply no idea what is actually happened and happening in Iraq."

Keith Olbermann led Countdown last night with this:

So clearly journalism isn’t out of the game. But be on the watch for more magical thinking — and for who lets the magic-thinker get away with it.