Jonah Goldberg the latest to falsely claim McCain called for Rumsfeld's resignation

In his July 22 Los Angeles Times column, National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg falsely claimed that "[w]ithin months of the [Iraq] invasion, [Sen. John] McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." In fact, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, McCain did not call for Rumsfeld to be fired, or for his resignation. The McCain campaign itself admitted to The Washington Post in February that McCain "did not call for his resignation. ... He always said that's the president's prerogative."

While McCain expressed "no confidence" in Rumsfeld in 2004, the Associated Press reported at the time that McCain "said his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld's resignation." Further, when Fox News host Shepard Smith specifically asked McCain, "Does Donald Rumsfeld need to step down?" on November 8, 2006 -- hours before President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation -- McCain responded that it was "a decision to be made by the president."

As Media Matters noted, The Washington Post reported in a February 9 article that McCain "regularly reminds audiences that he also criticized Bush's management of the war and called for Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation as defense secretary." After Media Matters noted the article's failure to report that McCain's assertion that he had called for Rumsfeld's resignation was false, the Post published an article reporting that McCain "overstate[d] his public position on Rumsfeld" and never called for him to resign. According to the February 16 article: "[D]uring a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., aired on CNN, McCain said, 'I'm the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go.' A McCain spokesman acknowledged this week that that was not correct. 'He did not call for his resignation,' said the campaign's Brian Rogers. 'He always said that's the president's prerogative.' " The February 16 Post article also noted that "McCain's false account has been unwittingly incorporated into the narrative he is selling by some news organizations, including The Washington Post."

Indeed, in addition to the Post, MSNBC chief Washington correspondent Norah O'Donnell, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, PBS' Charlie Rose, and CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger have all falsely claimed or suggested that McCain called for Rumsfeld to resign or be fired.

From Goldberg's July 22 column:

Yes, McCain heroically pushed for the surge when the war was at its most unpopular point. Even more impressive, he favored a change in strategy back when the war was popular.

Within months of the invasion, McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Later, when the Iraqi civil war erupted, Al Qaeda in Iraq metastasized and the Iranians mounted a clandestine surge all their own, McCain doubled-down; he argued that we couldn't afford to lose and proposed a revised counterinsurgency strategy for victory. That was the same very month that Obama introduced the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007."

That's all great stuff for McCain's biographers. But the tragic Catch-22 for the Arizona senator is that the more the surge succeeds, the more politically advantageous it is for Obama.