McCain Eats French Fry Sandwich, Jokes About Killing Iranians

PITTSBURGH — As I sat at the bar at Primanti Brothers, the iconic Steeltown eatery, sipping a 23-oz. Yuengling and trying to wrap my hands around a giant, greasy, french-fry laden behemoth of a sandwich, my phone vibrated with news from the latest pool report. It seems Sen. John McCain, and his wife, Cindy, visited the flagship Primanti Bros. store on Carson Street — I was at the Market Square location — where the two mingled with the crowd and took questions from the press before dining on french-fry stuffed cheese steaks.

This, in and of itself, is unremarkable. However, McCain managed to turn a pedestrian local campaign appearance into a newsworthy event. After he dismissed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s latest call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from his country, a reporter from The Associated Press asked McCain about increasing American cigarette exports to Iran. McCain replied, “Maybe that’s a way of killing them,” after which he quickly added, “I meant that as a joke.”

Funny, right? With Sy Hersh’s recent piece in The New Yorker about possible American covert military activity in Iran and an administration with short time, a short fuse and maybe a score to settle, joking about killing civilians in a hostile country is probably not the most reassuring thing a presidential candidate could be doing right now. Maybe I’m overreacting, but if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a similar joke about killing Americans, something tells me McCain would not find it so funny. I guess he didn’t learn anything from the infamous “Bomb Iran” incident after all.