What the hell

Lately, John McCain has been on a tear of weird, unnecessary gaffes. At the current pace, his advisors are going to have to work really hard to maken sure he only names his Vice President once, and that it's a real person ("McCain/Mr. Magoo '08!"). Normally it's petty and useless to focus on gaffes, but it's starting to seem like this is some sort of perverse attention-grabbing scheme. Or maybe Curtis was right, and McCain is a true patriot desperately trying to get Obama elected for the good of America.
Either way, the McCain gaffes break down into three basic categories. First, we have Probably Just Senility, which includes:

• Confusing Somalia and the Sudan
• Referring to Putin as the President of Germany
• Referring to Czechoslovakia three different times, even though it has not existed for over 15 years
• Mentioning the Iraq/Pakistan border (roughly the equivalent, in terms of distance, of the North Dakota/Mexico border)
• Describing his Vice Presidential vetting process as "a Google"
• Describing his favorite blogs , which "Brooke and Mark" show him, as Drudge (not a blog), Politico (not a blog), and RealPolitics (not a thing)
• Screwing up his own anecdote about giving his Vietnamese captors the names of various Green Bay Packers (recently he said it was the Pittsburgh Steelers), even though he has told this story probably hundreds of times for forty years, and it's his own fucking story

The second category is Horrible Judgment Calls, which includes the subcategory Why Would Anyone Tell This Joke, which includes:

• Two different jokes about killing Iranians
• A joke about how then-teenaged Chelsea Clinton was so ugly because her dad was Janet Reno
• A joke about a gorilla raping a woman

And in the non-joke section, we have:

• Pressuring Obama into going abroad, where he sank three pointers and inspired nations, then criticizing him for going abroad
• Scheduling a press conference for an oil rig, right before a hurricane
• Having his wife put plagiarized recipes on the campaign website, instead of just not putting recipes on the campaign website
• Hinging his energy plan on gas taxes and drilling, even though he himself admits that neither will do anything
• Countering Obama's success abroad by fucking up an applesauce purchase on TV

Finally, we have Not Knowing Basic Facts About His Only Political Interest, Which Is War. This includes:

• Thinking that the Anbar Awakening was caused by the surge, even though it happened six months before the surge, and then getting mad at Obama for disagreeing
• Five years after the war started, not knowing basic facts about Al-Qaeda, Iran, the difference between Sunni and Shi'a, and Iraq, all at once
• Saying that troops were down to pre-surge levels when they were actually 20,000 troops above them
• Thinking that the Iraq War was a good idea in the first place

What the hell? What does his campaign staff even do? Are they literally just there to drive his bus? Has he given up? Maybe at the convention he'll change "Peace Prosperity Reform" to "Apathy Confusion Whatever" and the Straight Talk Express will become the "Ah, Fuck It Express". Maybe he's self-handicapping so he won't feel bad, i.e., "Hell, I came in second and I didn't even do anything." Maybe he just expects to be dead before the election. The debates this time around should be awesome.

McCain Jokes

While writing a not-that-good post that I later deleted, it occurred to me that this is a really crazy headline to see about a major Presidential contender:

McCain jokes about killing Iranians with cigarettes

This is his second joke-like utterance about destroying Iranians, the first being "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran". Matt Yglesias points out that if Ahmadinejad made a comparable joke, like, I don't know, "We will send hamburgers on the wings of glorious angels to kill the Great Satanists where they Eat", it would probably be viewed as evidence that Iran is run by insane people whom you Cannot Meet Unconditionally and Should Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb. Of course, Iran probably has already drawn that conclusion about a McCain administration, and if so they are correct.
But maybe McCain was just trying to create more Conditions. Now if he "meets" the enemy, they will know that they better give him whatever he wants or he will lunge across the table and feebly gnaw at their faces or something. This could (i.e., would certainly) backfire. The Iranians c(w)ould say, "The hell with this, let's just kill any Americans we see before they cigarette our babies to death".
But if it did work, imagine the possibilities: A military industrial complex of weird half-assed jokes about death to enemy civilians. I see Jay Leno as the potential czar of this empire:

Jay: Hey Kev, you hear that the U.S. is putting used land mines in teddy bear exports?
Kevin Eubanks of The Tonight Show Band (stoned): What?
Jay: Probably to kill the North Koreans!
Kev:
Jay: We're killin' some North Koreans (to the tune of "Good
Vibrations")
Kev: What the fuck.

Hell, I'd start watching.