Obama: There will be no joint trip to Baghdad with McCain

Greg Sargent at the TPM Election Central blog reports that he talked to the Obama campaign yesterday about McCain’s suggestion that he and Barry O. travel together to Iraq. Here’s what BO campaign spokesman Bill Burton had to say:

“John McCain’s proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don’t want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer.”

Translation: We don’t need no stinkin’ distractions.

Jules Crittenden, on the other hand, isn’t quite so charitable in his response.

Sargent spun Burton’s statement like this:

Obama hasn’t visited since 2006, and McCain had tendered his invitation by saying, with characteristic civility: “He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time.”

Not the best way to persuade someone that you’d make a fun travel companion, obviously.

LOL yeah. Like a formal invite would have made all the difference.

An equally sweet invitation would be for someone who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on European Affairs (which has jurisdiction over NATO) to ask its chair, Senator Obama, if he’d like to finally hold any policy hearings on Afghanistan, a place where, you know, he’s claimed since January 2007 that we need to “refocus on.” Incidentally, January 2007 is not only when he became chair of the Subcommittee on European Affairs, but it’s also when he started campaigning for president.

It’s all about the priorities, you see …

Via Memeorandum.