There Are Known Knowns, and Unknown Unknowns, and then there's WTF?

From a reported exchange of views on Afghanistan:

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said everyone at the table in the State Dining Room shouldered part of the responsibility for the decision.

A Senate aide told TPMDC that Kerry said, "Mr. President, this is your ultimate decision, but it's shared by the Congress because together we have to hold together the consent of the American people for this policy, that's one of the lessons of Vietnam."

McCain later said he disagreed with his colleague. "This is your decision - your sole decision," he told Obama.

Lately our political discourse seems to me to have become not merely more opaque but ultimately insane. Its partly the abymsmal reporting and editing. But its partly because people like McCain don't mind acting out like toddlers having a sugar induced meltdown. I can't even figure out what this exchange is supposed to mean. McCain is supposed to have urged Obama to quick, decisive, action because after 8 years the next five minutes are always "of the essence." To me this is like the fat man on the elevator screaming at the skinny guy who gets on last that he is responsible if the elevator falls. Kerry seems to have done the gracious and logical thing and pointed out that every single person in that room, who has been around for the last eight years, bears some responsibility to think this through carefully. McCain seems to be stuck on using an actual war, and the deaths of thousands of people, as a manly way of sobbing that he would, too have been a better president than Obama.

aimai