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Both the NYT and WaPo bravely (sic) tucked away Nuri al-Maliki's endorsement of Barack Obama's troop withdrawal plan in the third paragraphs of their stories about Barack Obama in Afghanistan. (Call me old fashioned, but when the Prime Minister of a country we are occupying calls for us to withdraw, I think it deserves a story of its own.)

I guess they hadn't received the Iraqi government spokesman press release from CENTCOM yet, so they didn't have an opportunity to defend Maliki by saying he had been mistranslated (without specifying what had been mistranslated). Kevin Drum ably smacks down the notion that the CENTCOM missive should be accorded any credibility.

Anyway, in other news, I'm continuing to plug along on my upcoming "McCain on Iraq" video. I think I'm pretty much done gathering clips, but perhaps tomorrow's news will generate something big.

However that turns out, here's another raw footage clip. I'm not sure I'll be able to end up using much of it, but these are pretty good ones. The first two clips are pre-war -- from 9/12/02, and the second two are from 11/5/03. In the first two clips, McCain dodges and evades questions about post-Saddam Iraq. In the second two clips, McCain directly contradicts his claims from this campaign; in one, he says Rumsfeld should not be fired, and in the other, he says that Bush is doing a good job telling the country how tough the war will be.

YouTube link