Over at Americablog, John McCain is getting skewered for saying, on CNN, that the new top American general in Iraq is able to ride around in an unarmed Humvee these days:

General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You see, you are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don’t get it through the filter of some of the media.

McCain also said:

There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today.

To which a CNN correspondent in Iraq replied:

Honestly, Wolf, you’ll barely last twenty minutes out there… It’s unclear what part of Neverland that Senator McCain is talking about where Americans can stroll the streets of the capitol Baghdad. If Al Qaeda doesn’t get an American, if a Shia militia isn’t…tipped off, if the Sunni insurgents don’t grab them, then a criminal gang will see dollar signs and take them immediately.

Watch the video of all of this here, it’s quite something.

After the video came the McCain denial (hard to deny something that’s on video) and the smack-down from the DNC, and the retired general contradicting McCain, and then this from McCain:

The consequences of failure are catastrophic because if we come home, bin Laden and Zarqawi, they are going to follow us.

To which an Americablog blogger replied:

Um, Senator … Zarqawi is dead. Not only is he dead, but the Senator used his death, which occurred nearly ten months ago, to smear those who advocated redeployment: “[Zarqawi’s death] has got to be viewed as a success,” he said. “It’s got to be viewed as perhaps a bit of a rebuke against those who are advocating that we cut and run out of Iraq.”

McCain knows his age is going to be an issue as the presidential campaign goes forward. (If he wins, he would be the oldest president ever to take office.) If McCain is serious about this race, he shouldn’t be handing out such easy ammunition for those who want to paint him as forgetful and out of touch.