VAN SUSTEREN: What do you think about that? Is that a decision that — that you think is a wise one or do you want the full 40,000 that was originally requested?

MCCAIN: Well, I’m not so much concerned about the number because I understand that it may be additional allied troops to help out, too. I’d like to look at the overall strategy. I would like to see the emphasis on succeeding, not on an exit strategy.

Greta, the exit strategy takes care of itself once you succeed just as it did in Iraq. But I’d like to hear the whole thing. I hope the president will make the right decision here. And I would like to support him if he does.

Watch it:

At least McCain is consistent; an exit strategy for the war in Iraq has been of little concern to him as well. When running for president, the Arizona senator and fervent Iraq war supporter said he would “be fine with” the U.S. military staying in Iraq for “a hundred years” and later “excitedly declar[ed] that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for ‘a thousand years’ or ‘a million years,’ as far as he was concerned.”

Indeed, as the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss has noted, McCain’s knee-jerk reactions to the crises in Iran last June and in Georgia last October, and now with his “no exit strategy necessary” policy, reminds the U.S. of the bullet it dodged last November by not electing him president.

Obama reportedly plans to announce an exit strategy in the coming days.

The 2,000-page bill would mean more regulation and mandates, he said. People wouldn’t be able to keep the coverage they had. It would also increase taxes and the cost of Medicare, he said.

The bill claims to save $500 billion in waste from Medicare, he said.

“I don’t think so,” McCain said. “I think it’s going to cut it.”

He encouraged audience members to cut up their AARP cards and send them back.

McCAIN: I think we should as much as possible say — and our message is, we want this strategy and we want to support the president and unite the country behind it. Let’s face it. The president, when he makes his decision — and again, I believe that he will– will have trouble with the base of his own party. And so the more united we can be behind him, I think the more the chances are of success and American public support.

“I don’t believe I heard you say whether you thought that was helpful or unhelpful,” Schieffer noted. “I don’t know. I would leave that to others to judge, really,” McCain again dodged. Watch it:

On ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta said, “I think if Cheney is the voice of the opposition, that’s fine. I think he has the least credibility. Almost every strategic piece of advice he gave the president was wrong. I think President Bush stopped listening to him by the end of the administration. So if that’s what the Republican Party has decided — that they want to have him as their most outspoken critic of the administration — I think President Obama ought to welcome that.”

This government takeover of the Internet will stifle innovation, in turn slowing our economic turnaround and further depressing an already anemic job market. Outside of health care, the technology industry is the nation’s fastest growing job market. Innovation and job growth in this sector of our economy is the key to America’s future prosperity. In 2008, while most industries were slashing jobs in the worst economy in nearly 30 years, high tech industries actually added over 77,000 good high-paying jobs. Just this month, Google and Yahoo both released positive earnings reports.

First of all, it’s ironic that McCain cites Google and Yahoo as examples of why net neutrality rules need to be blocked. In fact, both companies have said that without such measures, the “longstanding openness of the Internet” will be threatened. From a letter they wrote to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2006:

Until FCC decisions made last summer, consumers’ ability to choose the content and services they want via their broadband connections was assured by regulatory safeguards. … This “innovation without permission” has fueled phenomenal economic growth, productivity gains, and global leadership for our nation’s high tech companies.

To preserve this environment, we urge the Committee to include language that directly addresses broadband network operators’ ability to manipulate what consumers will see and do online.

However, telecoms largely support blocking net neutrality rules, and McCain is a long-time friend of these businesses. McCain was the top recipient of campaign contributions from the telecom industry, taking in $894,379 in the past two years.

Even as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2003 to 2005, McCain made sure to craft technology rules that benefited his campaign donors. He opposed a program designed to provide discounts to schools and libraries to connect to the Internet and supported large telecom mergers.

Of course, the GOP point man on technology issues is someone who, just last year, called himself a computer “illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get.” In July 2008, he said he has “never felt the particular need to e-mail.” As former FCC chairman Reed Hundt has explained, “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it” — and we’re now supposed to trust him to shape the way we use the Internet.

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen and Media Matters’ Jamison Foser have previously expressed confusion about McCain’s popularity on the Sunday show circuit:

Foser: “John McCain is not president, he chairs no Senate committees, he represents two percent of the U.S. population, he lacks a strong constituency even among his own party — a party that is pretty widely disliked and has taken a thumpin’ in two straight elections. He is not playing a central, or even peripheral role in the health care debate. And yet he’s on television all the time.”

Benen: “But it’s the Sunday shows’ obsession with McCain that continues to be so absurd. … McCain isn’t playing a role in any important negotiations; he hasn’t unveiled any significant pieces of legislation; he isn’t being targeted as a swing vote on any major bills; and he’s not a member of the GOP leadership. He’s just another far-right senator, with precious little to say that couldn’t have been predicted in advance. Indeed, we already know exactly what he’s going to say this week.”

Two weeks ago, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos justified booking McCain on This Week arguing that he “is the leading GOP voice on Afghanistan.” Yet McCain has consistently been off the mark when in comes to the war there. In fact, during McCain’s last Sunday appearance discussing Afghanistan, he dodged questions of the role the war in Iraq — a war he fervently supported and much of which he was also wrong about — in the deteriorating situation there.

Foser has noted that when Al Gore and John Kerry lost their presidential bids, “the media had a clear message for them: Get out of the way and let George W. Bush govern.” In fact, Kerry appeared on just three Sunday talk shows in the first eight months of President Bush’s second term.

It appears that the Beltway media are just still in love with their maverick pal John McCain.

McCain made his 14th Sunday show appearance since January on CNN today to discuss Afghanistan. During the interview, McCain again called on President Obama to ramp up U.S. troop levels there, modeled after the “surge” in Iraq. “Many see a parallel to Iraq in the sense that it’s been eight years in Afghanistan now it has been billions of dollars” and “we have shed American blood there,” host John King said. But McCain didn’t want to go there:

MCCAIN: First of all, rightly or wrongly we were focused on Iraq. I happened to believe we had to win there. Whether we should have gone in or not, weapons of mass destruction, you covered on other days.

Watch it:

McCain probably doesn’t want to discuss “whether we should have gone in” to Iraq or WMD because at the time, he got it all wrong. Just like Bush administration officials, he hyped the Saddam-Al Qaeda link and Iraq’s non-existent WMDs and said war in Iraq would be easy and that Sunnis and Shias would “probably get along” after Saddam because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

And as New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted in a scathing column today on McCain, it isn’t all that clear how much the “surge” contributed to reducing violence there or if that strategy can be transferred to Afghanistan. But also, Rich noted that, “What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan”:

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

If McCain has been so demonstrably wrong about these wars in the past, why is the Beltway media so eager to call on him time and time again for his views on Iraq and Afghanistan?

“Ha ha,” she added dryly, when I told her that Imus, in a discussion with another first-day guest, Sen. John McCain, repeated a “joke” that after 9/11 “President Obama was the second attack on America.” (McCain, on the phone, laughed more heartily.)

After McCain laughed at the joke, Imus attempted to distance himself from the comparison, calling it “an idiotic thing to say.” Watch it:

Transcript:

MCCAIN: Well, you’ve got to hand it to our law enforcement and homeland security people that they’ve been finding out about these plots, several of them before they’ve been able to act. I think we ought to give them some credit. And maybe we might give George Bush a little credit for the fact that we’ve not had another attack on the United States since 9/11. We blame him for everything else. Hahahaha

IMUS: Somebody told me, somebody told me off the record — well, they didn’t tell me off the record. They just, I just couldn’t use their name, but they said — we’re talking about why there’d been no second attack — and they said they thought President Obama was the second attack.

MCCAIN: Hehe.

IMUS: That was an idiotic thing to say.

Americans aren’t sick of hearing from their president. A new poll shows that only 34 percent of the public believes they are hearing “too much” from Obama; 54 percent say they are hearing “about the right amount.”

The person who does seem to be getting an inordinate amount of exposure is defeated presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). ABC’s This Week host George Stephanopoulos is pumping an “EXCLUSIVE” interview he has scored with the senator this week. But as Steve Benen points out, it’s not really all that exclusive:

For those keeping score at home, this will be McCain’s 13th Sunday morning appearance since President Obama’s inauguration in January. That’s 36 Sundays, for an average of a McCain appearance every 2.7 weeks.

Since the president took office, McCain has been on “Meet the Press” twice (July 12 and March 29), “Face the Nation” three times (August 30, April 26, and February 8), CNN’s “State of the Union” twice (August 2 and February 15), and “Fox News Sunday” three times (July 2, March 8, and January 25). His appearance on “This Week” on Sunday will be his third visit in five months (September 27, August 23, and May 10).

That’s a lot of appearances for someone who isn’t the president or part of the congressional Republican leadership. This latest round of hyperventilating isn’t the first time the media has criticized the President for taking his message to the public (through the media). In March, journalists and pundits wondered whether Obama’s “media tour” was taking “attention away from his message” on the economy. Ironically, one of the pundits joining in was Meghan McCain:

KING: Over exposure?

McCAIN: I think he is on the verge of it. I do think you have to be careful. But it is a different generation. You know, mine, the generation of YouTube and Twitter and MySpace and we like our celebrities. … However, he is on the risk of alienating his older followers.

Watch it:

According to Eric Boehlert at Media Matters, after Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) lost to President Bush, he made just three appearances on the five major Sunday news talk shows in the first eight months of 2005.

I think John McCain would have been worse — [laughs] How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?

Watch it:

Beck’s opinion elicited a fierce and angry response from right-wing radio host Mark Levin yesterday. “To say [McCain] would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact,” Levin said on his radio show. He then suggested Beck is playing politics: “I don’t know who people are playing to. I don’t know why they’re playing to certain people.”

Levin never mentions Beck by name (he refers to Beck as “the 5 pm’er” because Beck’s show airs at 5 pm on Fox News). He concluded with this final dig at Beck:

I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic.

Listen here:

Beck is causing consternation for many right wingers these days. Peter Wehner, a former political adviser to President Bush, recently wrote that Beck is “harmful to the conservative movement” because he’s “erratic,” “bizarre,” and is too interested in “conspiracy theories.” And Rush Limbaugh recently suggested to Politico that Beck’s role in promoting the 9/12 protest was “cheap and disingenuous.”

Kristol, Kagan, and Senor are now enthusiastically dedicating their efforts to building support for a U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, calling such a strategy “politically smart for Republicans.” Kagan said recently that withdrawing from Afghanistan would be to “commit preemptive suicide.”

President Obama is thus far resisting the calls to rush more troops into Afghanistan. “I don’t want to put the resource question before the strategy question,” he said on CNN yesterday. “Because there is a natural inclination to say, if I get more, then I can do more. But right now, the question is, the first question is, are we doing the right thing? Are we pursuing the right strategy?” In a letter to Obama earlier this month, FPI made clear that the only “strategy” it’s interested in is escalation:

Since the announcement of your administration’s new strategy, we have been troubled by calls for a drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan and a growing sense of defeatism about the war. … There is no middle course. Incrementally committing fewer troops than required would be a grave mistake and may well lead to American defeat. We will not support half-measures that repeat the errors of the past.

Of course, no one knows more about repeating “errors of the past” than Bill Kristol. At its conference this week, FPI has two separate panels on Afghanistan. The right-wing organization is not hosting a single Democratic elected official (though Rep. Jane Harman did participate in its last event on Afghanistan in March). Instead, the conference is marked by the presence of right-wing luminaries, such as Sen. Jon Kyl, former Gov. Mitt Romney, Elliott Abrams, and Newt Gingrich. Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is moderating a panel, while Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack from the Brookings Institution are also participating. Finally, the conference will fittingly wrap up tomorrow with “A Conversation with John McCain.”

Matt Yglesias writes that the Obama administration needs to “reject the kind of discredited neocon logic that says the only way to deal with the problem of the moment is with maximum force.” He adds, “the situation in Afghanistan has gotten as bad as it has in large part precisely as a result of the last administration listening to the counsel of people like McCain.”

Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Asked about Afghanistan back in Nov. 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to “muddle through”:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

None of the three hawkish senators, all of whom shilled relentlessly for the invasion of Iraq, have ever owned up to the now widely-accepted fact that the diversion of troops and resources and attention away from Afghanistan toward Iraq was the critical factor in the resurrection of the Taliban insurgency. Read more at the Wonk Room.

This past Tuesday, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John McCain (R-AZ) took their nationwide health care road show to Florida, where they teamed up with Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) to participate in a closed-door town hall event at the Palmetto General Hospital in Hialeah. ThinkProgress attended the forum.

During the question-and-answer session, Jim Dolan, president of the Florida Medical Association, expressed his anger with the American Medical Association for supporting President Obama’s health care plan. We “repudiate that action on their part,” Dolan said, speaking for his Florida chapter.

Dolan went on to propagate a version of the false “death panels” myth, claiming that the Obama administration is promoting “dranconian rationing that Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel, talks about as though it’s going down to pick up a loaf of bread.” Dolan wondered when are people going to realize that “the people advising this president” feel that the seniors “are expendable.”

Rather than distance himself from Dolan’s false assertion, McCain wholeheartedly embraced it:

McCAIN: Doctor, I know you have a day job, but I’d like to take you with me wherever I go. [Laughter] I’ve never heard it more eloquently put than you just stated the situation.

Watch it:

When his former running mate Sarah Palin first offered the false “death panel” claim last month, McCain defended her. He said that end-of-life counseling “at least opens the door to a possibility of rationing.”

McConnell and McCain will be continuing their health care road show this week. Both events will also be closed to the public:

– Charlotte, NC: McCain and McConnell will “join Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., in Charlotte on Tuesday for a ‘hospital forum’ at Carolinas Medical Center. With hospital employees and Burr’s invited guests attending, there will likely be little room for the public in an auditorium that holds fewer than 300 people, said Gail Rosenberg, spokeswoman for Carolinas HealthCare System.”

– Hialeah, FL: The event at Palmetto General will feature McCain, McConnell, and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL). “It will be open to the press, but closed to the public.”

Although McCain has held town hall meetings, McConnell has largely avoided them. His spokesman Robert Steurer said that he is instead “speaking to Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce and hospital groups.”

On Thursday on Kansas City radio station 980 KMBZ, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) — who has faced several contentious town hall audiences — criticized the GOP senators for not opening up their events:

McCASKILL: I’m disappointed that the Republican leader of the Senate is coming to Kansas City on Monday and participating in a forum, but they’re not opening it up to the public. It’s invitation-only. I think it might be helpful for the leadership in the Republican Party to have some of the experiences I’ve had over the last week, where some of the meetings are wildly in favor of reform, and other meetings are wildly against it. I think having that pulse is important, and I think the Republican leader would benefit from that.

Elsewhere in Missouri today, McCaskill is holding a health care town hall meeting where organizers expected 1,100 people to show up. Listen to the interview here:

I was talking earlier with some friends and I asked, who might emerge as the new Ted Kennedy in the United States Senate? You know who a lot of people think it might be? … That would be Senator McCain.

Watch it:

Ted Kennedy said “Americans want the choice of enrolling in a health insurance program backed by the government for the public good”; McCain says we have to “abandon the public option.” Kennedy joined with McCain to push aggressively for comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, a bill that McCain “would not” vote for anymore. Kennedy is remembered as a passionate gay rights advocate; McCain thinks discrimination against gays in the military is “working well.” See the similarities?

Check out “The Dream Lives On” — ThinkProgress’ video tribute to Sen. Kennedy.

Why don’t I have the health insurance you’ve got! Because I’m paying for it! And I’m paying for the President of the United States’ health insurance and Congress’ health insurance. Why don’t I have that! I’m your employer! I’m your employer! You work for me, and you’ve got a better health insurance plan than I’ve got!

McCain responded, “You’re exactly right. That’s why I want to make health care insurance available and affordable to you sir.” Watch it:

Federal employees have excellent health care because they are provided an array of affordable choices. Obama is pushing to expand choice for all Americans by creating a national health insurance exchange — modeled on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program — “where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose the plan that’s best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their families can.”

“One of these options,” Obama said, “needs to be a public option. It will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market so that we can force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.” But McCain adamantly opposes the public option.

Last night, McCain told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that America just “is not ready” for quality “government-run health care.”

The deal with PhRMA, which has been heavily criticized by the left, does raise questions, but it is odd to hear McCain criticize someone for soliciting the support of Billy Tauzin. In 2007, Tauzin contributed to McCain’s presidential campaign. When The Hill reported on the contribution in April 2008, Tauzin’s spokesman said, “Sen. McCain put out a call for help and Billy…answered it.”

“He is the president of the United States and let’s be respectful,” McCain said in closing. That statement was met with light applause from the crowd.

In fact, McCain is siding with his party this year on closely divided votes with greater frequency than at any other period in his 23-year Senate career, according to a CQ analysis of Senate votes.

On votes that pitted most Democrats against most Republicans, McCain has sided with the consensus GOP position 95.4 percent of the time, a CQ-defined “party unity” score that would be the highest of his Senate career if it holds up for the remainder of the year. He had a 95.2 percent party unity score in 1996, when Republicans held the Senate majority at the end of President Bill Clinton’s first term.

McCain’s year-to-date 2009 party unity score is the 14th highest among the 40 Republican senators. It’s even higher than that of the Senate’s top two Republicans, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (94.0 percent) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl , also of Arizona (94.5 percent).

Days after the President Obama’s inauguration, the Washington Post published an article declaring, the “Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick.” Apparently, they spoke too soon.

Similarly, now that President Obama is in the White House, McCain feels comfortable opposing the President’s well-qualified first nominee to the Supreme Court. But in 2008, when McCain thought he might be president, he sang a very different tune:

When President Bill Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg to serve on the high court, I voted for their confirmation, as did all but a few of my fellow Republicans. Why? For the simple reason that the nominees were qualified, and it would have been petty, and partisan, and disingenuous to insist otherwise. Those nominees represented the considered judgment of the president of the United States. And under our Constitution, it is the president’s call to make… It is part of the discipline of democracy to respect the roles and responsibilities of each branch of government, and, above all, to respect the verdicts of elections and judgment of the people. Had we forgotten this in the Senate, we would have been guilty of the very thing that many federal judges do when they overreach, and usurp power, and betray their trust.

In fairness to McCain, it may be premature to criticize the senator for opposing Sotomayor. After all, the Senate is not expected to vote on her confirmation until Thursday evening, and who knows how many times John McCain will change his mind between now and then?

Again and again, Judge Sotomayor seeks to amend the law to fit the circumstances of the case, thereby substituting herself in the role of a legislator. … To protect the equal, but separate roles of all three branches of government, I cannot support activist judges that seek to legislate from the bench. I have not supported such nominees in the past, and I cannot support such a nominee to the highest court in the land.

Despite his claim that he has never supported a judge who “seeks to amend the law to fit the circumstances of the case,” McCain voted in favor of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; and he described both Roberts and Alito as “model judges” during the 2008 campaign.  A few of these three justices’ greatest hits include:

• Repealing the Twentieth Century: In three opinions that read like a tea-bagger’s wet dream, Justice Thomas would have restricted Congress’ power to enact economic regulation to a point unheard of since the Great Depression.  A short list of laws that would simply cease to exist in Clarence Thomas’s America includes “the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws.”
• Selling Justice To The Highest Bidder: Roberts, Thomas and Alito all joined dissents arguing that a West Virginia coal magnate could literally buy a judge for $3 million to overturn a verdict against his company.
• Corporate Immunity From the Law: Joined by Roberts, Alito wrote a dissent arguing that drug companies have almost-total immunity from the law when one of their dangerous products caused a former professional musician to lose her arm and her ability to play music.  Roberts, Thomas and Alito also joined a majority opinion giving sweeping immunity to the makers of dangerous medical devices.
• Massive Resistance: All three justices joined a radical opinion which not only held that it is unconstitutional for school boards to desegregate public schools, but which audaciously cited Brown v. Board of Education for this proposition.
• This Election Brought to You By Wal-Mart: Perhaps most ironic of all, all three of McCain’s justices are poised to declare McCain’s signature legislative accomplishment, campaign finance reform, unconstitutional.

As a Yale Law School study published before Roberts and Alito joined the Supreme Court determined, Justice Thomas is the one justice who is most likely to vote to invalidate an Act of Congress — doing so a massive 65.63% of the time. The Court’s two Clinton appointees, Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, are the least likely to second-guess Congress.  So McCain has no problem with judges who “substitute [them]self in the role of a legislator;” he’s just upset that Sotomayor won’t push the same right-wing agenda as his favorite justices.