Fire Katie Couric (hire a journalist instead)

Someone should lose their job over this, anyways. Here’s a brief timeline for those of us who are temporal-perception-impaired.

September 2006 : The Anbar Salvation Council is formed. This is known as the beginning of the Sunni Awakening, in which a majority of Anbari tribes aligned themselves with the American and Iraqi government forces and began fighting against Al-Quaeda.

January 2007 : Bush announces an increase in US troop levels in Iraq. This increase becomes known as the surge. Notice that this happens after the Awakening.

“So I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq,” says Bush, while US troop levels are slightly over 130,000.

March 2007 : US troop levels pass the 140,000 mark.

April 2007 : US troop levels pass the 150,000 mark. The surge troops Bush announced in January have mostly arrived.

July 21, 2008 : Barack Obama claims that the troop surge is not the only factor contributing to reduced violence in Iraq, saying it’s also because of “political factors inside Iraq that came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops.”

July 22, 2008 : Katie Couric interviews John McCain. She asks him for his response to Obama’s statement on the surge and reduced violence.

McCain claims (this is from the CBS transcript) that “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.” That’s right, he’s claiming that the 2007 troop surge caused a 2006 event.

Katie Couric, apparently as unaware as McCain that in this universe cause generally comes before effect, fails to call him on it. She follows up this complete fabrication, and the rest of his rambling Abe Simpson response, with the question “A commentary on what?”

You see, the last word in McCain’s answer was ‘commentary’, so she just asked him to explain that word. Hard-hitting journalism!

CBS news sensed that they were on to a big story about a presidential candidate’s lack of foreign policy knowledge and problems understanding how time works. They did the only thing they could as responsible journalists : they replaced McCain’s ridiculous answer with the answer to a completely different question.

McCain’s explanation of imaginary history was replaced by one of his canned slogans. And they aired it that way. CBS’s response?

“The report was edited under extreme time constraints and one piece of tape was put in the wrong order. Fortunately, this did not in any way distort what Senator McCain was saying.”

Bullshit. They didn’t just distort what he said, they replaced it with a fictional response that meant something completely different, in order to make him look better.

At best, it’s some incredibly lousy journalism.