If John McCain has many more days like Tuesday, his only chance to get to the White House will be as a tourist. On the same day he dropped jaws with his joke about killing Iranians with cigarettes, McCain amazingly slammed Social Security as "an absolute disgrace." Then even as McCain's first-term balanced budget pledge was being pilloried in the press, Americans learned that 300 economists signed a statement supporting McCain which made no mention of it. And topping it all off, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's insistence on a timeline for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq put John McCain squarely on the defensive on his signature issue.
Coming on the heels of his April 2007 jest about "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," McCain's jest about killing Iranians with cigarettes of mass destruction served to once again raise eyebrows - and questions about his presidential temperament.
But that was hardly his most damaging gaffe of the day. While walking the fine line between extolling private retirement accounts without explicitly calling for the privatization of Social Security, John McCain stumbled directly onto the third rail of American politics. As Mother Jones reported Tuesday, John McCain during a Denver town hall meeting the day before attacked Social Security, the program responsible for dramatically reducing poverty among the elderly, for working exactly as designed:

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

Appearing on CNN Tuesday morning, McCain only compounded his error. Sounding like a rabid laissez-faire ideologue, an ignorant hack or more likely both, McCain told John Roberts:

"They pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken, that's why we can fix it."

As an amazed Jared Bernstein of the Economics Policy Institute put it, "It's like he's saying, 'I just found out that taxes come from people...that's a disgrace.'" MoJo's Nick Baumann summed it up nicely, "McCain is saying, again, that the problem with Social Security is that Social Security is Social Security." And given McCain's past support for Social Security privatization and his promise Monday to magically reign in entitlement spending in his comical effort to balance the budget by 2013, McCain no doubt just scared the bejesus out of America's senior citizens.
But McCain's woes on Tuesday hardly ended with his Social Security calamity. Just one day after his campaign proudly proclaimed 300 economists had endorsed his economic plan, the Politico revealed McCain's gambit to be a smoke-screen. The economists' statement, as it turned out, excluded the centerpieces of his "Jobs for America" document released Monday - a gas tax holiday and balancing the budget by the end of a first McCain term - precisely because so few believe in them:

Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don't actually support the whole of McCain's economic agenda. And at least one doesn't even support McCain for president.
In interviews with more than a dozen of the signatories, Politico found that, far from embracing McCain's economic plan, many were unfamiliar with - or downright opposed to - key details...
...The statement they signed is 403 words long - and there is no mention of the gas tax holiday or the deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will approach $400 billion this year.

As for that balanced budget pledge, it's no wonder, as the Politico's Mike Allen reported, that McCain wants "no videotape of it to show later."
Still, McCain's disasters on the home front pale in comparison to the Iraq trap which ensnared him yesterday. Seeking to gain leverage in the talks over a new status of forces agreement with the United States, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mouwafak al-Rubaie echoed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's insistence that a timetable for withdrawal of American troops is a requirement:

"Our stance in the negotiations underway with the American side will be strong...We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn't have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq."

Sadly for John McCain and his vision of 100 year U.S. military presence in Iraq, McCain in 2004 acknowledged that American forces would have to go if a sovereign government in Baghdad demanded it:

"Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because - if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."

After lambasting Mitt Romney and Barack Obama alike over withdrawal timelines, John McCain is now scrambling to address statements like those from Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh that the timeframe for a U.S. pull-out "can be 2011 or 2012." Exacerbating matters for McCain, the timeline quandary comes just days after Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen insisted that he can't shift badly needed troops to Afghanistan "until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq." To the consternation of the McCain campaign, the messages from Baghdad and the Pentagon sound like they were written by Barack Obama.
To be sure, Tuesday was a terrible day for John McCain. And judging by his new restrictions on campaign press, it sounds like Mr. Straight Talk just wants it all to go away.
UPDATE: As reader James notes in the Comments, McCain's Tuesday was even more self-destructive than I first reported. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, McCain took credit for orchestrating the release of American hostages from FARC rebels during his stop-over in Colombia:

Trib: What was the purpose of your recent trip to Colombia and did you accomplish what you hoped to accomplish?
McCain: Well, I'm happy to tell you that I orchestrated the rescue of those hostages.

As it turned out, McCain was joking. But in a statement almost as comic, McCain claimed that Iraqi government figures were in fact not calling for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from their country:

Trib: Senator, with Iraqi leaders now calling for a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals ...
McCain: Actually the Iraqis are not. The Iraqis widely reported as short a time ago as a couple of weeks ago that there would be no status of forces agreement, and Maliki would say that, and it got headlines, and of course it turned out not to be true.