And the Washington Post says so:
For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.
The attacks are part of a newly aggressive McCain operation whose aim is to portray the Democratic presidential candidate as a craven politician more interested in his image than in ailing soldiers, a senior McCain adviser said. They come despite repeated pledges by the Republican that he will never question his rival’s patriotism.
***The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.
***McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said again yesterday that the Republican’s version of events is correct, and that Obama canceled the visit because he was not allowed to take reporters and cameras into the hospital.
“It is safe to say that, according to press reports, Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of those reasons,” he said. “We’re not making a leap here.”
Asked repeatedly for the “reports,” Bounds provided three examples, none of which alleged that Obama had wanted to take members of the media to the hospital.
***A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama’s decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him.
Excellent work, Steve Schmidt. You now have the WaPo calling your candidate a liar because of a hit ad that you designed for… media consumption only. Additionally, this is bad for the future McCain campaign efforts because they have now called all those reporters questioning their claims liars, because they were there, first-hand, and know that the McCain camp is making things up. Finally, nothing better than disgracing your spokesman, forcing him to lie several times. Well played.
The McCain campaign forgot one basic thing on this attempted smear- the ego of the reporters and the mainstream media. These folks are fine with printing any lie you can come up with, as long as they have plausible deniability. You can feed them all sorts of shit about someone possessing WMD, or about Obama being Muslim, etc., so long as you cite unnamed sources or undisclosed sources in the government or anonymous experts, and you leave the blame somewhere else. They will print any old rumor if you do that.
But when you try to make them part of the lie, you just can’t get away with it. They were there on the trip- and the McCain idiots tried to make them part of the lie. And they might have gotten away with it had the Obama camp not fought back and had Andrea Mitchell not started the groundswell of media pushback. Now, when the McCain team tries to spread this lie, the egos in the media see it as an attack on their integrity, because they are named accomplices if they do not push back. Again, the ego of the media is the most important thing, and the McCain geniuses forgot it.
One small caveat- this is actual reporters at the Washington Post. I have no doubt that Richard Cohen or one of the other defenders of the prevailing narrative, the Hiatt hacks, if you will, will no doubt attack Obama on the op-ed pages for not visiting the troops. It will probably happen in October, right before the election, when it will be too difficult to re-fight the lie again. That is just how they roll.
4tehlulz
This sentence sums up why the media is so fucking broken in this country.
Tom65
I don’t think you’ll have to wait that long for some boot-licking on the Op-Ed page. The disconnect between the reporters and the editorial staff is legendary.
Punchy
Too bad the media consists of a few thousand votes, while the commercial he ran peddling this bullshit was seen by tens of millions.
Obama cannot and will not win if McCane can put out any ad he wants largely unchallenged. I just saw the one today on my tee-vee, telling me Obama is the sole reason for high gas prices. It’s a crushing ad for Obama.
Dave S.
Clearly the only thing more offensive to the media than questioning McCain’s integrity is having their own integrity questioned.
If we can only get McCain on tape saying “If I’ve lost Andrea Mitchell, I’ve lost whatever asinine fake demographic Mark Penn can come up with”…
cleek
McCain’s a chronic liar: dishonorable, dishonest. he makes W look merely weaselly.
i don’t dare assume the press is starting to notice a pattern, but it’s nice they noticed this instance. though you’re right, they’ll forget about the truth in a few weeks, and will refer back to this incident the way McCain wants them to.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
I’m not sure, but I think this is good news for Hillary.
Napoleon
Well I didn’t get to moon or give Bush the finger yesterday. His motorcade was just leaving my neighborhood when I was going home so had to wait until he left to get to my house.
Too bad!
For whatever it is worth the official part of his visit was to pimp for off shore drilling. The world may be going to hell in a hand basket, but the Republicans manage to stay on message for their corporate sponsors. But Bush did jump out of his car and wish one of my neighbors a happy birthday so I guess that makes him a regular guy and OK he is leaving office with the country burning down around him.
Interesting aside, yesterday was trash day and I wondered what Bush’s security would do with all those potential bomb containers lining his route. When I got home mine and my next door neighbors were dragged half way up the drive way and looking down the road others who had not taken there empty containers in yet had them flipped on their side with the open top facing the street so that you could see into them as you drove past.
A few years ago (2005) when he flew right over my house his helicopter was so low (I felt like I could have tossed my rake into its blades) that if I was half a block away and wanted to do harm I could not have, and on top of it there were multiple copters running the same route but spaced out so far that I could not hear the one any longer before I heard the next one coming. So you did not know what was the decoy and which had him (an acquaintance who was a military chopper pilot and observed one presidential copter trip and participated in another confirmed that they use multiple decoys).
nightjar
Desperation. The only thing left now is to wait and see if there are enough stupid voters out there to fall for this garbage again. I’m a little more hopeful there won’t be this go round, but have learned not to underestimate American laziness to become well informed. Especially having been one of those dunces most of my adult life. And so far McCain has shown he’s not very good at this kind of politicking, as you noted with trying to pull a fast one on eyewitness reporters.
We shall see, and if Mccain happens to fool enough people and gets elected, we will deserve the government we get.
Face
Funny thing: I don’t see “liar” anywhere in the blockquote. Please link me to where McCain’s spokesman is called a liar. He is, indeed, a liar, but I fail to see where the reporter correctly and deservedly says so.
AkaDad
I expect the media to punish McCain, by giving him donuts without sprinkles.
gbear
A New York Times editorial called the McCain camp out on the same thing this morning. Heaven forbid that this could become a trend…
jenniebee
LOL, McCain is just disciplining the press to stay in line with his message-discipline. If you think it’s something new, or that they’re ready to revolt if Republicans call them liars, read today’s MoDo.
McCain’s not slapping their hands: he’s giving cover to the orgs and reporters who want to spin things his way.
4tehlulz
Unfortunately, the quote would be
DannyNoonan
The McCain brand we’re talking about is running a campaign straight out of the Lee Atwater Playbook, with the candidate sounding more petulant and aggrieved every passing week. It’s about time he got called on it. And I agree that the only reason why was that the press was made complicit. But for now I have no problem pushing the meme back at McCain that he is nothing if not a ruthless, crass politician, drunk on arrogance. He convinced himself it was ok to make amends and help Bush in 2004, so long as that got him closer to the Oval Office. And he’s again convinced himself that using Mitt Romney to raise money and possibly even place on the ticket is fine if it serves the ultimate goal. The self-righteousness indignation and victimization McCain and his surrogates use against anyone who would dare get in McCain’s way (Bush, Romney and now Obama) is telling. While Republicans push the meme of arrogance against Obama, it’s their own man who bathes in the notion that no one else is deserving.
The Thinking Man's Mel Torme
There will be no fallout for McCain on this. It depends too much on nuance and explanation. It’s not high concept, in the Hollywood sense. “
OsamaObama hates the troops!!!” is.Anyone clinging to a shred of misplaced hope needs to read Perlstein’s “Nixonland” as soon as possible. We’ve only gone downhill since.
Grand Moff Texan
Well, Dana Milbank is already running with the phony “I am the symbol” story about Obama.
So, WaPo is only about half shit.
.
MattF
McCain is going after the ‘resentment’ demographic– or, if you prefer, the les assholes de ressentiments. So, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t true.
cleek
and that’s 100 grade-A Truth.
cleek
Weisman too. he’s getting totally slaughtered in comments, though.
jake
Repeat after me:
Liberal Media! Liberal Media! Liberal Media!
The Thinking Man's Mel Torme
Sadly, no. The Post may give with one hand, but it takes away with the other:
O RLY???
From Halperin, no less.
Chris Johnson
Oh wow.
He’s getting Tweetied.
“What did he DO?!? What did Chamberlain DO?!”
Lovely. It would be even better if we had real reporters- but it will suffice to have McCain forget that he can’t CALL them bootlickers.
Heckuva job, Cainie!
Incertus
Not really. This ad was run in just a couple of markets a handful of times. It was meant for media consumption more than anything else, i.e. the McCain wanted this ad to get the Swift Boat treatment; talked about, and replayed, but not on their dime.
The big deal about the front page article isn’t so much that reporters wrote it, but that the news editors front-paged it and even allowed it to be run in the first place.
The Moar You Know
I finally read some of that fine man’s intellectual droppings yesterday. I was stunned; my usual experience with the blogosphere is that, well…it tends to exaggerate.
Boy, not so with Mark “I can crawl further up in McCain colon, plz?” Halperin. Good God, to call the man a McCain fanboy is to insult the depth of his man-love and deep commitment to McCain. I felt like the only decent thing to do was to send him a pair of kneepads and a Trapper Keeper for him to scrawl “Mark + John FOREVAR” repeatedly on the front of.
Balloonatics, you all understated the case.
Zifnab
Who will seriously believe this lie, after the wave upon wave of “Obama is a Muslim”, “Obama is gay”, “Obama is a drug dealer in the Chicago mob” lines that have been getting pitched since last year?
The more ridiculous and outlandish McCain’s smears get, the more he loses the shreds of credibility that propelled him to the nomination in the first place. I’m betting there are a whole mess of voters in New Hampshire having second thoughts about their primary votes.
Mary
You’re both right: it was a commercial that ran in only a few markets, but the news channel audiences — numbering perhaps in the millions — saw it over and over and over again. I don’t get CNN any more, but MSNBC was infuriating. Yes, Andrea Mitchell was very clear and blunt, but she wasn’t on every report. I even remember seeing a Dem spokesman push back incredibly weakly against a Republican, calling the ad more of the same old politics BUT NOT SAYING THAT IT WAS A LIE.
Damn. Need more tea. And heroin.
Perry Como
This will be good for McCain.
Foxhunter
For those scoring at home or even alone…here is the definitive linkage to Mark Halperin’s liberal media bias.
Mark ‘Drudge Rules our World’ Halperin
Face
Article on Yahoo now saying the Gov’t is borrowing money to help pay the budget deficet.
My head just esplow’ded
Foxhunter
Link please? I am aware of all internet traditions, but I can’t use the google on the yahoo to find.
4tehlulz
Link
DOLLAR DIES
Perry Como
I often use a credit card to pay a credit card.
4tehlulz
Fixed
D. Mason
Yeah. I wonder who McCain failed to provide reach-around for at the last .. erm … media briefing.
The Moar You Know
Sure is. We’re fucking doomed.
Thank God the Republicans are standing squarely in the path of those “tax and spend” DemoncRATS, making sure that the gummit don’t take none of our hard earned monies.
rachel
Tucker Bounds wouldn’t happen to be a super-genius chimp with a cape, a giant brain under his hat, and a pseudo-Japanese accent, would he?
Punchy
I’m guessing a hell of a lot more people than we think. People actually believed that Kerry shot himself to earn some medals. People believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. People think Jesus rode a Brachiosaurus to the 7-11 for smokes and frozen ‘za. People will believe ANYTHING.
gbear
McCain Camp Admits Their Ad Was False
Via The Jed Report
gbear
McCain Camp Admits Their Ad Was False
Via The Jed Report
Chris Johnson
GODDAMMIT! YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, THAT WAS YOUR FUCKING IDEA TO TRY AND BRIBE EVEN THE CITIZENS OF THE COUNTRY WITH YOUR PATHETIC KICKBACKS AND NOW YOU’RE USING THAT AS YOUR EXCUSE???
ow, my head just exploded… I am beginning to hate these people SO much…
How about DON’T BRIBE VOTERS WITH TRANSPARENT ATTEMPTS TO CURRY FAVOR if it’s going to WRECK OUR ECONOMY FOR US!
ow ow ow…
The Moar You Know
Hopefully no more than 49.9% of the population, but goddamn, this is America we’re talking about here. Hate to sound down on the country, but fuck, there are a lot of idiots living here.
Chris Johnson
Can I get a show of hands- how many of us here ASKED these guys to send out ‘economic stimulus checks’?
RSA
As of 2004, the number was 62,040,610. A few things have changed since then, but I expect a good many of those voters have not noticed.
Nikki
“I just saw the one today on my tee-vee, telling me Obama is the sole reason for high gas prices. It’s a crushing ad for Obama.”
I’ve seen the same ad here in the DC market and let me just say that you are half insane if you think that ad is devastating for Obama. It’s more crushing for McCain because too many people are laughing at it.
Brachiator
I don’t know. It doesn’t take much nuance to correctly call McCain a lying sack of shit.
And John Cole is right in that McCain is making a strategic error in trying to get reporters to lie for him on the record. This is incredibly stupid and almost immediately self-defeating.
And fortunately, McCain doesn’t understand the internets and other new media. It’s hard for him to get away with suggesting that Obama hates the troops when people have already been watching beaming troops hanging with Obama on YouTube.
By the way, here’s a backhanded compliment to McCain. While I think that Hillary Clinton was practiced at the arts of deception, and took to lying and distortion the way that a duck takes to water, McCain is a decidely inartful dodger. The way that he keeps harping on clumsy lies even after he has been found out suggests that he dislikes this aspect of politics and is trying to rebel against it even as he keeps on throwing out new shit.
McCain keeps shouting, “Stop me before I lie again!” The least that the press and everyone else can do is to keep slapping him around.
Zifnab
Power Puff Win.
Ricky
Frightful reminder from my own internet encylopedia, dedicated to Texas Preservation:
Many wandered to Texas in search of their freedom or their fortune. Mr. Bush wandered here in Daddy’s car seat, squandered Daddy’s friends fortunes, found no oil, and traded Sammy Sosa. Then five members of the Supreme Court made him President.
TexaRickipedia
People vote regardless of fact or fiction.
grandpajohn
Ain’t it amazing that such a simple little 3 letter word does not seem to even exist in the vocabulary of our major media outlets or even among our spineless spokespeople.
cleek
and now he’s blaming the press.
could it be, is it …. a lovers’ quarrel ?!
i bet the make-up sex will be great, though.
cleek
which is, of course, McCain’s “true virtue“:
Gregory
Not only that, Jed sez they’re blaming the
lieerror on — yes! — the media!as the media swings around to contradict McCain’s story, the campaign is trying to stay on offense, blaming the press for the confusion
As John pointed out, this move sets the McCain camp against the egos of the MSM. Here’s hoping both sides lose.
gbear
McCain’s true virtue is that he is a lousy politician. He is not a convincing liar, and when he adopts positions that are not his own, they infect him, sapping him of what might be called
integrity energyhis precious bodily fluids.limbaugh's pilonidal cyst
This is good for Rudy!
Seriously, though, has anyone here ever known anyone named “Tucker” who wasn’t an asshole? I’ve known two personally and they were both world-class jerks. Is this one of those cases where onomatology is destiny?
I now prepare myself to be flamed by everyone named “Tucker” or who knows someone by that name who isn’t an asshole.
TenguPhule
Enjoy your AIDS.
Brachiator
Jeez. Richard Cohen ends up kissing McCain’s ass even while — mildly — criticizing him. The real problem, of course, is that McCain can’t really turn this kind of vicious lying into a virtue. You can’t become crooked and still claim to be a straight talker.
Cohen also demonstrates another problem with McCain apologists. They keep trying to push McCain’s totally phony line that Obama is too young and “untested,” whereas McCain is experienced. But experience ain’t the same thing as tenure. I am amazed (OK, not really) that reporters don’t ask McCain, “How the hell can you have been in Congress for all those years and have the nerve to admit that you don’t know anything about the economy?”
Cohen then goes on to continue to try to turn McCain’s military sacrifice — not his supposed military knowledge — into a qualification for the presidency.
That McCain has endured much is admirable, but this is not in itself sufficient, especially when McCain appears to be intellectually inflexible. But it unfortunately says a lot that both reporters and some voters see McCain’s ability to hang in there as something especially meaningful with respect to his ability to be a good president.
Mike D.
SS doctrine is straight out of a Monty Python movie: at the first hint of trouble they broadcast the code for “Run away!” and literally pick up their assigned protectees and dash for the nearest transport, straight to a bunker full of radios and shoulder weapons. Rakes are metallic and easily tracked by Funny-Looking Kids brand counter-sniper radar, but a PVC mortar powered by CO2 and loaded with a dense plastic slug, fired directly at any of the helicopters’ main rotors, would cause the whole circus to very visibly panic and scatter like roaches. Flying under telephone wires, the whole nine yards.
It would be God’s mercy if none of the choppers pranged a station wagon full of nuns or lost an argument with a high-tension wire and slammed straight into the deck in the center of a four-way four lane intersection. American practice is to seek safety in numbers, the better to swagger and puff up like bullfrogs, so you can expect any ill-fated gunship escort to take six to ten passenger vehicles with it when it goes to meet the Great Scorer. This is when you want an MiB “flashy thing” or orbital Jesuit pink laser beam to dry-erase people’s minds, but unfortunately everything is taped and photographed all the time these days, so it’s harder to pretend stuff didn’t happen than it used to be. Bush compared the stock market to a drunk with a hangover and it was duped a thousand times and spread everywhere in less than a day. Apaches v. Silverados in slow-and-go traffic don’t stand a chance.
What’s being described is an act of terrorism, and if you wanted to crash the NYSE you could do worse than a historical recreation of W staring blankly into space while his aircraft short-hopped its way nowhere in particular, while, back at the ranch, Darth Cheney was undisclosed and dug in as snug as a bug in a rug. That shit would sell like ice water in Hell on the world markets (which never sleep, alas) less than half an hour after a fluorescent green Big Bad John dildo chipped one rotor blade on one helicopter in an airmobile motorcade.
Incidentally, this is why President #44 can’t bring the troops home. The Soviets brought back the Afghantsi and a year later the vets were controlling organized crime, applying their intimate knowledge of the opium trade, wholesaling arms, and killing anyone who inconvenienced them even momentarily, without bothering to check what uniform they were wearing. Ain’t life a bitch?
Jeff
It doesn’t take much nuance to correctly call McCain a lying sack of shit.
Paul Alexander, who wrote a biography hagiography of McCain was still trying to sell all the shit. “Oh,yes, he has a temper, but only when faced with obsticles!”. What kind of “obsticle” was Cindy being when he called her a c**t?
Freaking A-holes!
pj
I don’t think this will hurt McCain — the swift boat lies were debunked to a far greater degree, yet none other than John Cole was a huge Swift Boat promoter on this very website. I remember visiting here back then, and no amount of factual evidence could make a dent — lies work.
mightygodking
Similarly, my last-place finish in last year’s marathon merely demonstrates that I am uncomfortable with the rules of an organized foot-race, which makes me a much better runner than most because I am more in tune with what my feet want.