Don’t ask CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist to make any apologies for featuring the feedback of the Arizona senator: “He has appeared for decades on cable news programs, network news programs. He’s articulate, he knows what he’s talking about and he has strong positions. He represents the views of millions and he represents them effectively. He’s a veteran and is loved by many veterans and he’s not just a senator; he’s a former Republican presidential nominee and a war hero.”

Someone finally got CNN to explain why Sen. John McCain seems to have a permanent chair on all the major news networks. It certainly is a window into the dark and hollow cable news soul. We'll set the "articulate" aside. He knows what he's talking about, though? Really, we're doing this again? All right:

Ahem. The majority of John McCain's foreign policy positions over the last fifteen years are notable for being spectacularly wrong. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he was making the rounds asserting Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he dismissed the scale and the potential casualties of the war, or when he claimed our Iraq intervention would "stabilize" the region. He didn't know "what he was talking about" when he went to Syria to insist that we should be arming the "good" rebels while getting photographs with "good" rebels who turned out to be terrorists. To have faith that John McCain knows what he's talking about is, at this point, akin to having faith that your room full of typing monkeys will be producing the next great American novel any day now. Oh, he has strong positions, I'll give you that one. It's just that the strong positions tend to—how shall we say this politely?—get a lot of people killed.

That's the thing, though. In Washington-speak, John McCain knows what he is talking about because the part about being catastrophically wrong is still, damn it, entirely beside the point. Being wrong won't get you discredited so long as you can still speak similarly good word-things through your mouth-hole the next time around. Spilt milk! Stop living in the past! Effective talking at people is rewarded; ineffective or incompetent boobery in the actual things you talk about is fine so long as you can make it to the next commercial break.

This is why we have climate denial, you know—because he knows what he is talking about need not bear any relation to the actual facts of the world, so a scientist and any well-groomed heel are considered to have exactly the same amount of wisdom to contribute to the question. This is why we keep signing ourselves up for wars, only to end them ingloriously after it turns out the facts on the ground were not at all what the loud people in the nice suits told us they would be. This is why we still think tax cuts to wealthy people will result in prosperity for all. This is why George Will exists.

No, the day when being proven wrong or a liar counts as a professional strike against you is the apocalyptic day half the pundits in Washington live in fear of; the day one person is called to task for being incompetent in their self-professed expertise is a day when some other very wrong people might see the hatchet come for them as well, and we can't have that. Let the wars and the floods come, if the alternative is that.



More: “I think that for a 78-year-old senator, he . . . remains a strong and important voice in American politics and a relevant voice in American politics,” says Feist, whose “unscientific” analysis is that McCain hasn’t been appearing on CNN more recently than he has over the past couple of decades (fact-checkable!).

He's a strong voice in politics because he is a strong voice in politics. Enough said. And don't bother fact-checking that last part, because we've already hit the commercial break.