McCain timing hardly magical

Check your pots for chickens. If no cluckers are found, it is only because the Straight Talk Express has not yet rumbled onto Pennsylvania Avenue and deposited its contents, an Arizona senator foremost among them, on the White House lawn.
John McCain appeared — with a click of loafer heels and a wiggle of bulbous nose — in Columbus, Ohio, on Thursday to unveil a vision of the world with him as its supreme being.
Timetables being damnable things in the mind of McCain, he began by setting one. By 2013, McCain declared, war will be won in Iraq, troops will be mostly home or on their way, Osama bin Laden and his top thugs will be dead or wishing they were from behind bars, the sputtering economy again will be in full hum, the skies will be clear of coal’s dread carbons, global warming will be in retreat, Republicans and Democrats will be pals and dogs and cats will be living together.
OK, scratch the bit about dogs and cats. Caught up in the audacity of hopeless politicians, we added that one ourselves. The remainder came from the lips of the Republican nominee famed for shooting from the hip, though his talk these days is about as straight as a mountain road.
Where to begin? The gravitation of pundits and Democrats was, naturally, toward Iraq, where McCain once told us American troops might remain for 100 years, then settled on five.
Close followers of the campaign will have no need of recalling McCain’s previous positions on withdrawal. Reminders are oozing from keyboards, television speakers and the Internet. McCain has been virulently opposed to the slightest hint of a withdrawal deadline. He famously chastised former GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney for suggesting that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki speak privately about “a series of timetables and milestones.”
Setting a date for withdrawal, McCain argued, would lead to “chaos, genocide and the cost of American blood and treasure would be dramatically higher.”
McCain’s assertion was unpopular and perhaps melodramatic, but substantively correct. Extracting U.S. troops from Iraq, where we concur with those who say they should not have been sent, is a complex ambition of extraordinary proportions. Troop pullouts in ordinary circumstances are negotiated. That is impossible in the case of Iraq. With whom would America negotiate, and whose word could be trusted? Would either side be willing to sit down at a bargaining table with the other?
Absent negotiated terms, principally stipulating that troops be permitted to leave without fear of enemy assault, American soldiers would be overrun, which more precisely means slaughtered by the thousands. All the presidential candidates know this, and none would risk it. This is why timetables on the subject of Iraq carry the weight of the heated air in which they are spoken.
As is his wont, McCain bristled in a National Review Online interview at the suggestion that he had violated his own proscription. “You either didn’t read or understand my speech ...” he told a questioner. “... I selected 2013 because that would be the end of my first term, I think that’s fairly apparent. So, of course we would be able to have further troop withdrawals as we are winning. It would be based on recommendations of generals and the facts on the ground.”
Translation: My speech was unadulterated rhetoric (a pleasant word for another substance) aimed at getting me elected. Of course, I didn’t actually mean 2013, and how dare you suggest otherwise.
Similar descriptions apply to most of McCain’s Columbus address. Unless McCain produces a magic that his mere words only feigned, American pots are likely to remain as empty as his promises.