From The Slate
By Fred Kaplan

A couple of weeks ago, according to the New York Observer, Sen. John McCain stood in a small back room of Manhattan’s Regency Hotel and told a group of wealthy political donors, “One of the things I would do if I were president would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’ ”

Someone in the room should have told McCain to do the same thing.

Then again, McCain isn’t so different from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who made a special trip to Baghdad last month with Britain’s then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for the purpose of telling the members of Iraq’s fractured leadership, “Start governing.” She made a similar plea on a second trip, a few weeks later, this time with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “The key now is to get the government up and running — and then go about the work of dealing with the security situation, dealing with the economic situation.”

It’s reminiscent of Ross Perot’s loopy run for the White House in 1992, when he told eager voters that he’d “just take a look under the hood and fix the problem”–as if politics were like making an engine run, when it’s more like deciding where the car should go.

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