I think this is the first time I’ve seen her take a shot at The One. I knew she had it in her!

Too bad she doesn’t have a better reply to Melber, though. The topic here is Maverick accusing Obama’s NSA, James Jones — who’s been friends with McCain for 30 years and might well have been his NSA had he won the election — last week of pandering to the left by downplaying the risk of a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. Jones took exception to that on the Sunday chat shows, leading McCain to double down on Monday:

On Monday, McCain shot back, telling the FOX Business Network: “Anybody who believes that you can hand over the country or significant parts of the country to the Taliban and not have to worry about Al Qaeda returning and working with them and becoming a base for attacks against the United States of America has no understanding of the region or the nature of the enemy.”

McCain went on to criticize Jones’ handling of the war in Iraq, saying his decision to send troops to Iraq’s border to “kill Al Qaeda from the outside” was “wrong” and that the Obama administration should be mindful of that as it plans its military strategy in Afghanistan.

“General Jones was wrong about Iraq, and the fact is we need to get this decision made and we need to get help to those 68,000 that are over there, and more of them are in harm’s way the longer we delay,” he said.

Melber’s right that McCain hasn’t offered any evidence that Jones is in the tank and Meggie doesn’t accept his challenge to do so, but I’m not sure if that’s because she doesn’t have any and is simply reflexively defending her pop of if there’s something going on behind the scenes here between McCain and Jones that she’s privy to. Note what she says when Melber asserts that The One is working with the chain of command and talking to his generals regularly: “That’s not what some of us are hearing.” McCain has plenty of friends in the Pentagon who could be whispering to him about what’s going on between them and the White House these days; the question is, would he have really said something to Meggie about it? Hmmm.

Goldfarb, who used to be a McCain insider himself, wrote a post about this a few days ago that’s worth reading as a gloss. Would Jones really play politics with something like this? Well … maybe.