With Little Bo Peep, it was her sheep. With Gramps McCain, it’s his marbles. And just like Little Bo Peep, he doesn’t know where to find them.

Last time we looked in on Gramps, he was befuddled about what it takes to repeal a bill. Or, to be fair to him, that may just have been a carefully calculated con (since the recipe essentially involved McCain telling Republicans that if they wanted healthcare reform to be repealed immediately, all they had to do was tuck some money under McCain’s pillow; the Repeal Fairy would take care of the rest).

But I don’t see how anyone can put any wait-he-may-still-have-some-marbles-left spin on this statement from a recent townhall meeting in Nashua, NH:

There’s a lot of other issues that I, we’d like to [inaudible], but I’d just wanted to say again because our veterans are here, that I’m happy to tell you that elections in Iraq went okay. Look, democracy is a hard thing, but it was a contested election and there’s no other country in the Middle East besides Israel where there’s a contested election. And the most importantly than that, now for three months, there has not been a single American servicemember killed or wounded in Iraq.

The number of Americans actually killed or wounded in Iraq in the last three months — as of March 13, when McCain made that statement — is 101 (12 dead, 89 wounded).

(Of course, by current Republican standards, McCain’s statement may well qualify as perfectly accurate — “Most importantly than that, your honor, it wasn’t a single American, it was a hundred and one” — but somehow I don’t see even McCain hiding behind the skirts of that argument.)

I am now convinced that we are eventually going to learn that John McCain has been suffering from a rare, degenerative brain disease for a while now.