McCain Forgetful or Something Else?

McCain's episodes of forgetfulness keep occurring at a regular rate :

1: Putin President of Germany:


2: Had forgotten he had said he wasn't an expert on the economy:


3: Thought he had walked freely through a Bagdhad market without body armor, while, in fact, he looked like this and was surrounded by hundreds of American Soldiers and three Apaches:

4: Thought Petraeus had told him that he went around Baghdad in an unarmored Humvee. (There's video for this, too, and for just about all these other screw-ups, but that would result in the longest post ever, so I'll refrain. YouTube has ample documentation of all this stuff.)

5: Denied strongly that he had criticized the media in his Cottage Cheese/Lime Jello Speech, and in fact that he had personally struck out that particular line - when he had, in fact, delivered that line. Forgetful? Or something else?

6: Saying he had voted for every Katrina investigation, when he had voted against 2 of them for sure, and more if you look at amendments.

7: He thought we were back down to pre-Surge troop levels, when we aren't even close. And McCain says Obama isn't in touch with the military.

8: He thinks Iran, a Shiite country, is training and arming Al Qaeda, a Sunni group. He was corrected by Lieberman, then got Sunni and Shiite confused again the next day.

9: He said the Sunni and Shiite didn't have a long history of violence against each other.

10: He said he didn't think we could stay in Iraq indefinitely because of the nature of the culture over there. An occupation is untenable - that we would always have casualties. Now he says we could be there for 100 years without human cost.

11: He's been confused about Gen Petraeus' chain of command. Petraeus only makes decisions about Iraq, not the entire Theater.

12: Proposes a Cap-and-Trade system, but doesn't understand that there is a cap involved.

It's not quote mandatory caps. It's cap-and-trade, OK. It's not mandatory caps to start with. It's cap-and-trade. That's very different. OK, because that's a gradual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. So please portray it as cap-and-trade. That's the way I call it.

What is the most generous interpretation of these events? That he's very forgetful.