Photo courtesy John McCain 2008 - www.JohnMcCain.com Republican presidential nominee, John McCain image:38500:12::0

Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993 and split into Czech Republic and Slovakia, both of which are member states in the European Union. John McCain made an error yesterday when he blamed the Russian government for reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Russia has stopped oil supplies as an indirect protest for the Czech Republic’s support for the U.S. missile defense system.

The McCain campaign may call it as “slip of the tongue”. They even scrubbed the transcript of the event in McCain’s blog.

Republicans will point out Obama also makes mistakes. But McCain repeats the mistake again for the second time at a town hall meeting Tuesday. He mentioned Czechoslovakia again and said the following (shown in the video):

And I regret that and I regret some of the recent behavior that Russia has exhibited in I’ll be glad to talk about that later on including reduction in oil supplies to Czechoslovakia when they agreed with us on a missile defense system.

Thinkprogress points out McCain has repeated this mistake few more times in the past in 1994 and in 1999. The last time he made that mistake, the critic was none other than the George W. Bush.

Bush criticized McCain for making the “Czechoslovakia” mistake and the media giving too much preference for McCain. He told the U.S. News & World Report: “I don’t think there is any plot; I hope there isn’t…But it’s an amazing phenomenon, I’ll tell you that. It’s like the flap over the foreign-leader deal. A guy gets up and quizzes me — it’s my fault for trying to answer — but John McCain says something about the ‘ambassador to Czechoslovakia.’ Well, I know there is no Czechoslovakia (there’s a Czech Republic and a Slovakia), but yet it didn’t make the nightly national news. I’m not going to gripe about it, but the media question is starting to pop up.”