Must-see video: Katie Couric and CBS rehabilitate nonsensical McCain response on the surge

Can John McCain screw up publicly concerning history, geography, and essential facts about the Iraq War faster than the broadcast media can cover his trail for him? It’s turning into a cat-and-mouse game of no little drama. The litany of jaw-droppers that have burbled from McCain’s lips in the last few months has been pretty astounding. Shia Iran is training Sunni al Qaeda. Repeated present-tense references to Czechoslovakia. Fundamental misstatement of how the Basra ceasefire came about. The reference to the "Iraq-Pakistan" border. The last, no doubt, can be passed off as a slip of the tongue, but it’s notable that McCain did not catch it himself. It would appear that the old synapses aren’t firing as rapidly as they once did, or else McCain can’t bear to listen to what comes out of his mouth either.

There are signs that non-broadcast media are coming round to this story, like the summary piece about McCain foreign policy gaffes by the very mainstream Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei that appeared at Politico yesterday.

But TV newsers still love McCain as much as ever, cognitive deficit or no, as CBS demonstrated in spades on Monday when it edited a Katie Couric interview with McCain so as to omit McCain’s real answer to a question about conditions in Iraq prior to the surge–perhaps because McCain gave a demonstrably false answer, turning the chronology of events there on its head. (Spencer Ackerman, of our sister site Washington Independent, has a backgrounder on how McCain got it wrong.) So instead, CBS inserted in its place a snippet of McCain’s answer to a different question entirely.

The Jed Report has the video, including the response that wound up getting left out.

Jed Report: CBS edits McCain gaffe (2:34)