In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on the Sunday, July 27, 2008 special Late Edition show "The Next President", John McCain, when asked if Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq within a certain timeframe, how he would respond, McCain said:

"He won't.  He won't, he won't."

Senator McCain seemed to be upset earlier in the interview when first asked about the Iraqis calling for a timeline for U.S. withdrawal, responding:

"Prime Minister Maliki understands that conditions have to be kept."

Let us examine these statements.

It doesn't get much plainer than this:

"How to Be Bushtastic" or just "A Fierce Hot Mess"
Keep Reading, I'll make this quick...

A Child’s Garden of Cheap Shots, because if you can’t enjoy yourself at the expense of a guy with $100-million who gets laid better in one hour than you will in your entire sorry life, well who can you kid?

Left: NY Gov. Eliot "John" Spitzer disguises himself as jack o' lantern for D.C. tryst.   Right: Turning that frown upside down to put on a game face for consituents, from whom much has been taken away. (AP photos)

I can think of more than 10 reasons why Obama should not debate Hillary - on Faux, MSNBC or CNN.

Too many diaries and comments on the pros and cons.

My ten cents worth.....

He's not the only one, of course.  It happens at every debate; the moderator poses an oversimplified question and bears down, insisting on a show of hands or a yes or no, making it impossible to put the answer into a context that helps educate the public on the issue.  If I were a Democratic presidential candidate, this is what I would say to the next moderator who handed me a narrow question and insisted upon a narrow answer;

Wolf (or whomever), you're asking narrow questions and insisting on narrow answers.  You call it clarity, but I call it black-and-white thinking.  We've had a president who deals in black-and-white thinking for the past seven years, and he's no advertisement for oversimplifying.  This country has complicated problems and those problems need to be put into context.  You may think America is too dumb to understand what I'm saying up here, but you're wrong.  Americans have had seven years of easy answers.  Now what they want is the RIGHT answers.  Any follower can say yes or no.  Leadership--and that's what this country so desperately needs--means being able to say a whole lot more.

Journalism's function in a free society is to be the reservior of historical memory.  Journalist are suppossed to capture history in the making so that historians can come behind them and write the history of the times with the most accurate and clear contemporary data.  That purpose is ill-served when Journalist engage in ill-conceived "gotcha" questions based on false dicotomies.