We've gone beyond the silly season that occurs every four years in American politics and fallen headlong into out and out surreality, with the traditional media, once again, missing the boat entirely. While they're obsessing about ministers and flag pins, all hell is about to break loose, again, in that inconvenience of a war we seem to be hopelessly mired in.

Let's just start out with a bit of a reality check. Four more Americans [1] died near Baghdad's Green Zone yesterday. We've lost at least 44 American troops this month, the deadliest since last September. There has been a step-up in attacks again on the Green Zone, suggesting that Americans are the target again in Iraq's civil war.

Some other bits of news you might not be hearing: an audit of US reconstruction projects [2] in Iraq has found that millions of the $100 billion you, the American taxpayer, has sent to Iraq have been wasted. Some 855 reconstruction projects have failed. That failure rate might have something to do with the fact the Pentagon has a bit of a problem in vetting those it awards contracts to. For instance, it does things like award $300 million contracts [3] to 22 year-old felons.

All of this has been essentially endorsed by one of our presidential candidates, the one who thinks 100, 1,000 or even 10,000 more years in Iraq would be just fine. Though, once he let that cat out of the bag, he's been trying desparately to walk it back. It looks like he's got at least one traditional media outlet in the bag for him, as Josh Marshall [4] discusses.

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It seems the AP has fallen for the McCain campaign's and the RNC's effort to prevent anyone from using McCain's own words against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. As noted earlier, what the McCain campaign is pushing for here is a standard in which any negative ad targeting McCain must be delivered with the McCain camp's own spin included in order to be within bounds -- a standard few politicians, to say the least, have ever been granted. And even though the political press has been highly indulgent of the McCain campaign on this issue, I don't think I've seen any news organization so egregiously buy into McCain's false statements as the Associated Press.

The AP article lede [5] reads: "The Republican National Committee demanded Monday that television networks stop running a television ad by the Democratic Party that falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq."

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One little adverb tells the story. See, it's the RNC asserting the ad falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq, which the AP seems to accept as gospel. Never mind that the DNC ad actually has McCain, on video, plainly saying that 100-year occupation in Iraq would "be fine wth me." Or that in follow up interviews, including on Meet the Press, McCain has gone on to say that we could be there for thousands of years, and it would be OK. As Marshall says:

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The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

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Marshall's point that McCain's use of this talking point during the primaries is critical, and it's another nuance you're not likely to see picked up by the traditional media. See, just three short years ago, as the Huffington Post's Sam Stein reminds us [6], John McCain forcefully rejected a long-term occupation of Iraq in an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews:

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In fact, when asked specifically if he thought the U.S. military should set up shop in Iraq along the lines of what has been established in post-WWII Germany or Japan -- something McCain has repeatedly advocated during the campaign -- the senator offered nothing short of a categorical "no."

"I would hope that we could bring them all home," he said on MSNBC. "I would hope that we would probably leave some military advisers, as we have in other countries, to help them with their training and equipment and that kind of stuff."

Host Chris Matthews pressed McCain on the issue. "You've heard the ideological argument to keep U.S. forces in the Middle East. I've heard it from the hawks. They say, keep United States military presence in the Middle East, like we have with the 7th Fleet in Asia. We have the German...the South Korean component. Do you think we could get along without it?"

Joan McCarter is a contributing editor of DailyKos.com and a researcher of Western politics

McCain held fast, rejecting the very policy he urges today. "I not only think we could get along without it, but I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence," he responded. "And I don't pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be."

McCain, against the occupation before he was for it.

In politics, there really isn't anything more important than war. The decision to take a nation to war, and to keep it there--to send citizens in to harm's way and to keep sending them there--is the most profound one political leaders have to make. The fourth estate failed the nation in the run up to this war as much as our political leaders did. They bought the administration's lies about the Iraqi threat hook line and sinker. Now we're there, there's little that's more important to the health of our nation--its economy, its body politic, its standing in the world--than finding some way to end this Iraq debacle.

The war in Iraq and its major consequence--the near ruin of the nation's economy--are at the forefront of voters' minds this election season, as every public opinion poll [7] done in the last few months proves, despite the fact the traditional media would have us all obsessing about how our candidates choose to accessorize their lapels, and what Barack Obama's former preacher has to say about things (while conveniently ignoring the outrageous statements [8] of another religious leader actively supporting John McCain).

Unfortunately, you go into an election with the press corps you've got, not the press corps you need.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter's weekly blogs are part of a feature on PoliticsWest called "Diary of a Mad Voter." The group blog, published in partnership with NewWest.Net/Politics [9], is intended to give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the 2008 election year.