McCain is Our Ekthpert On Foreign Policy (UPDATE 1)

UPDATE 1: Contradiction section added as next to last paragraph

Let's start with Keith Olberman, who has a lot more power than anyone else I'll mention.

Media Matters also has a post on Couric editing McCain's answer.

I found it via the Carpetbagger report, who provides some good links to more material on McCain's remarks and also, in another post, he links to Anonymous Liberal making the profound point that if we redefine surge, Obama was for it.

In case it wasn't already crystal clear that McCain was baldly and badly covering his misstatements at King's supermarket, let's show how he clearly contradicted himself.  Here he says the "surge" included the Anbar Awakening: "First of all, a surge is really a counterinsurgency strategy, and it's made up of a number of components, and this counterinsurgency was initiated, to some degree, by Colonel McFarlane, in anbar province, relatively on his own."  McCain says the surge included the Anbar Awakening.  Yet in the CBS interview the day before he was saying the Anbar Awakening succeeded because of the surge, thus clearly making them two separate things:

Couric: Senator Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias and says there might have been increased security even without the surge.
What's your respone to that?

I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Col. McFarlane was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that Sheikh and others and it began the Anbar Awakening.

The Sunni Awakening succeeded because of the surge, and the Sunni Awakening was part of the surge.

P.S. I grew up going to a King's supermarket, and liked it!