1115.org

Who is Randy Scheunemann?
He’s John “Oops!” McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, the one who advises him about things like Iraq and Afghanistan. (And who forgets to tell him every night that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist any more.)

What did Randy Scheunemann say yesterday?

The American people deserve a commander-in-chief who puts their country first ahead of party, politics and self-interest. Time after time, that is what John McCain has done and what Barack Obama has failed to do. We cannot afford to replace a Rumsfeld strategy that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with an Obama strategy that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq.

What makes Randy Scheunemann an expert on Iraq?
You’ll be glad you asked. Here’s who Randy Scheunemann used to be:

Scheunemann was a core participant in the lobbying, plotting and organized campaigns of deception that led America to war in Iraq. He was a close collaborator with Ahmad Chalabi through the 1990s. He helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which created the new funding stream for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. At the start of the Bush administration he signed on as Don Rumsfeld’s ‘consultant’ on Iraq at the Pentagon. And then when the administration started cranking up the machinery for the propaganda campaign in favor of war he went back on the outside to form and lead the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, to lead the press and lobbying campaign to make sure the war got started on schedule.

Remember, US intelligence later found evidence that Chalabi, in addition to foisting a bunch of bogus intelligence and lying informers on the US and pocketing a lot of US taxpayer dollars, had provided highly classified US intelligence to Iran. Scheunemann worked closely with Chalabi for years in his efforts to get the US into war with Iraq. He was also a go-between between Chalabi and McCain.

The guy who was a consultant to Rumsfeld on Iraq, who personally greased the path to this misbegotten war, who has been described (not now, after the dust-up over his Rumsfeld-Obama comment, but last month) as “a prominent advocate of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the lead-up to the war”, this guy has the effrontery to stand up and blithely denounce the Rumsfeld strategy?

The dishonesty is breathtaking, yes, but the McCain campaign has set such standards for dishonesty that only the most breathtakingly dishonest people make even the first cut.

(And in case you were wondering, of course, he’s a lobbyist. And, of course, he worked as a lobbyist for foreign governments at the same time he was advising McCain. That’s practically a requirement for being a top campaign adviser to McCain.)