That’s the question John McCain must be asking himself after hearing a strange assertion from Bill Clinton about Hillary Clinton’s qualifications. Bragging that “the girl” has more former military commanders endorsing her than anyone else, Bill said that her unique experience among all of the candidates on the Senate Armed Services Committee made the difference. If so, the commanders must be as bad at research as Bill, because McCain has served on that committee since before Bill and Hillary ever came to Washington:

He continued to highlight the military issue later in Cary, accentuating his wife’s gender to emphasize his point that more generals have endorsed Clinton than both Obama and Republican candidate John McCain.

“You might wonder why that’s so: Why did they endorse the girl for president? All these generals?” Clinton said.

He said that’s partially because she’s the only member of the Armed Services Committee in the race and also because of her support for wounded veterans.

Er … what? A quick check of the ASC committee page on the Senate website to prove Clinton wrong. At the top of the column of Republicans sits John McCain, ranking member on the Committee. According to Wikipedia, he’s been there since 1987, or about four times as long as Hillary, who joined the committee in 2003.

It’s going to be hard for Bill to claim that he wasn’t aware of McCain’s presence on that committee. McCain served on the ASC every year Bill Clinton was President. Hillary supposedly attends the committee meetings, for that matter. If she never noticed that McCain sat at the same table she did, it’s fair to ask what else went over her head at the meetings.

Are the Clintons making this up as they go along? Were their lies always this threadbare, as with Hillary’s claims of facing down deadly danger on her USO trip to Tuzla in 1996? The Democratic race appears to have descended into a contest to find the least-worst option, and both candidates are working hard to lose that contest.