Apparently McCain has said (on multiple occasions) that that al Qaeda is going to Iran where they are being trained and then sent back to Iraq. That’s simply wrong — and Joe Lieberman corrected him on one of those occasions, leaning over to whisper in his ear while the cameras captured the image. Ouch.

But Josh Marshall points out that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg of reasons why McCain is unfit to be the next Commander in Chief.

Here’s an excerpt from a longer piece, the video for which is embedded below. Read this, then watch the video. It really goes to the heart of why McCain is the last guy you want to be the next President of the US:

What stands out about McCain is his inability to see beyond the immediate issues of tactics — military tactics, mainly — to any firm grasp of strategy or America’s real vital interests…

The idea that fighting jihadists in Iraq or policing that country’s ethnic or religious divides is the calling of our century [as McCain has said] is belied by almost everything we see around the world today — [the] issues that McCain is unwilling, or unable to confront. And these are the issues that seem most likely to be the challenges that we face throughout the rest of our lifetimes and the lifetiimes of our children…

Military power is almost always based on economic might. The one — military power — seldom outlives a country’s economic power. What that tells us is that fiscal soundness — whether a country’s budget is in order, whether it has chronic current accounts deficits — is a much bigger deal than any one weapons system or even any one small conflict as we have in Iraq.

So let’s step back and survey what we see around the world today. You see the huge sums of money that we are pouring into Iraq, the mountains of capital that’s being built up in China, and — in the background — the fossil fuel powered resurgence of Russia. Related to that, you have the weakness of the dollar, not just in the rate of exchange with other currencies, but also the threat that the dollar is under for remaining to be the reserve currency, the dominant currency, around the world. And on top of that, the rising tide of anti-Americanism in almost every corner of the globe…

Each of these issues is inter-related, they fit together in a variety of ways, they are all interlocked. [And] I’ve watched John McCain pretty closely for more than a decade…and I’ve never seen anything that has given me any indication that he’s given any consideration to these issues — China, Russia, the economic and fiscal standing of the US — except as they come up as near term military challenges…