John McCain — who in the past few months has made a number of flatly false claims about the Iraq War (most memorably, about Shi’ite Iran training Sunni al Qaeda members, and the terms of the April ceasefire in Basra) –  has inserted foot in mouth again, telling a Wisconsin crowd yesterday that the Bush war plan “is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels.”

As the Obama campaign immediately pointed out, this is false. Most of the 30,000 additional troops dispatched as part of the fabled Surge are still in Iraq — about two-thirds of them. (John Aravosis of Americablog does the math.)

The McCain campaign responded with the same grace and finesse for which it is becoming famous: Its math pedant critics were “nitpicking” over verb tenses, and should have realized that when McCain said the US has already drawn down to pre-surge troop levels, he really meant that it plans to do so in July. Really.

McCain in Wisconsin: “Pre-surge levels” (:15)