John McCain screwed up on Foreign Policy 101 AGAIN. Yesterday at the AP annual meeting, McCain said he would defer any decision to General Petraeus over whether troops should be shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to intensify the search for Osama bin Laden. Only problem is that this is not Petraeus’s job, as he has stated before.

By my count, this makes 6 times this month that McCain has screwed up basic foreign policy facts…the other 5 being various conflations of who exactly is fighting in Iraq.

As Hertzberg says today: It’s easy to say one word when you mean to say another, nearly identical word, but it’s impossible to repeatedly misspeak an entire anecdote—or, as in McCain’s case, an entire strategic reality.

Couple that with remarks made by leading conservative thinkers in the New York Times last week. They claim that McCain “is not as fully formed on his foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.”

This is not deep homework, and has nothing to do with running for President. For John McCain to make this many mistakes while holding an important national security post as Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee is simply unacceptable. These types of mistakes would prevent John McCain from getting a job as a research assistant at any think tank in DC, let alone delivering anything resembling a responsible foreign policy as president.

The brilliant minds of the punditry seem content to ignore this pattern or question it in any way, despite the fact that McCain is repeatedly screwing up the very platform upon which he claims to run. I’m all for having a healthy conversation about why McCain makes these mistakes, but the first step is admitting that it is wrong, irresponsible, and unacceptable. It is the "job" after all of talking heads to hold our leaders accountable. This is much more than a “gaffe.” This is demonstrated and repeated incompetent behavior that has very real consequences.

I, for one, am pretty bitter that it's not getting any airtime.