The Republican National Committee is leaning on the TV networks to refuse to air the anti-John McCain spot made by its counterparts at the DNC and released over the weekend. (We posted the :30 ad here.) The RNC is thereby trying to take out of play once and for all McCain’s repeated claims that he would be happy to leave US troops in Iraq for 100 years or more. And the news media are buying in, as these dispatches from AP and USA Today indicate. McCain and the GOP’s plea is that it’s all a question of words ripped out of context and that he was talking about a long-term occupation of Iraq without US casualties. Which is true — and which absolutely deserves more scrutiny, since it’s a perfectly mad little fantasy that a Western power can occupy Iraq without violent resistance. Ask the Brits.

When would McCain leave Iraq if this fantasy never came to pass? Josh Marshall found additional footage of the candidate with his foot in his mouth on the same subject in a TPM-TV post earlier this month, and followed it with a cogent explanation of why occupying Iraq cannot be compared to the bases we established in Japan, Germany and other vanquished states after wars there. Highly recommended. That video is below the jump.

Continued: Click “Read More”TPM-TV: 100 years of quietude, 4/8/08 (4:50)