This is really more John’s territory, but here’s McCain’s schedule yesterday (from his website via NoMoreMisterNiceGuy):
**U.S. Senator John McCain will be appearing on the following television programs TOMORROW December 2, 2009, beginning at approximately 7:00 am ET.
7:00 am NBC’s TODAY Show with Matt Lauer
7:00 am ABC’s Good Morning America with Robin Roberts
7:00 am CBS’ Early Show with Harry Smith
7:30 am CNN’s American Morning with John Roberts
8:00 am Fox News’ Fox & Friends
7:00 pm CNBC’s Kudlow Report
5:30 pm BBC Newsnight with Gavin Esler
7:00 pm BBC World News America with Matt Frei
Derelict
Obviously, the only newsworthy person to whom news people can turn in times of newsiness . . .
. . . is the guy who lost the election by a large margin, brought us Sarah Palin, and has reversed himself on his own positions repeatedly in the last 12 months.
That’s the new news newsiness of the new journalismismmess. ness
Also
grass
Like Herpes, everyone has him.
dmsilev
Shouldn’t he be, you know, doing his actual job of Senator? Debating health care and things like that?
On second thought, maybe keeping him stuck in a series of TV studios is a better idea.
-dms
ricky
What is the BBC’s excuse?
Jay in Oregon
Am I missing something about how he can be on three morning shows at once at 7 a.m.? Are they different time zones?
And yeah, when in the history of our country has the media cared so much about what the loser of a presidential election has to say? I don’t remember Bob Dole getting such attention…
ricky
Isn’t it Viagra time for McCain?
Jay in Oregon
And John, I think you need to make “Tire Swing” a category.
I almost did a spit-take when I read your tweets with the #tireswing hashtag…
geg6
The poor limo driver.
gex
He should probably resign his seat. I mean, does he even have the time to be a Senator with his successful acting/TV career?
GeneJockey
Hmmmm, let’s see – he’s despised by his own party for being a “RINO”, and for losing the last election and letting a
black guyDemocrat take the White House. He’s despised by Democrats and Independents who had briefly flirted with the idea of him as a post-partisan bridgebuilder.Seems to me the only folks who like him are the ‘Liberal Media’ and Joe Lieberman.
jnfr
It’s good he puts that schedule up so we know which shows to avoid.
bayville
Kudlow talking to McCain= O-for-the-Decade.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Yeah, yeah, that’s all very impressive. But I don’t see any reality-TV attention-whore robot monkey ninjas trying to crash any of McCain’s parties. So there.
NobodySpecial
@TLTABQ:
McCain IS the reality-TV attention-whore robot monkey ninja.
Also.
PeakVT
What is the BBC’s excuse?
None. Their US political coverage sucks.
Alex S.
@gex:
Does he even have the time to be a successful TV/media actor with his Senate career?
eemom
Somehow the NotPresident also made it to this morning’s Senate whatzis committee hearing on Afghanistan with Clinton, Gates and Mullen, and boy did he sound like a cranky old woman when he was bitching about the withdrawal date.
Kryptik
I’m sure that the media tour will result in people questioning him in a forceful, meaningful way.
Right after the presentation of his favorite coffee and doughnuts.
Slugger
After hearing McCain’s tired old man voice on the radio, I have concluded that we need an upper age limit amendment for political office. Very few above the age of 60 have the energy to be President. I’m 64 and comfortably sliding downhill.
trollhattan
Listening to NPR headlines this a.m. they played but one sound bite as part of the Afghanistan story: President McCain.
Damned at Random
SO, do the show schedulers call McCain or does his office have them all on quick-dial? Is there no other Republican senator capable of stringing a sentence togeather – the bar isn’t very high after all, Paln is a media star
trollhattan
Forgot to mention: McCain was pretty much verbatim applying the “let conditions on the ground decide, not an artificial timetable” line that was soooo popularly applied to Iraq during the election.
All the hits, all the time.
Maude
Someone show McCain the location of Pakistan. It’s not right there by Iraq.
gopher2b
Hardest working man in showbizness.
cmorenc
Didn’t John Kerry drop off to a pretty low profile within six months after losing the 2004 election by a *much* narrower margin than did John McCain? Yes, Kerry has intermittently made appearances on the Sunday talking head shows, but with only a small fraction of the relentlessly continuous saturation John McCain has. And without coming anywhere remotely close to making a palpable idiot out of himself during his presidential campaign as did John McCain.
Sure, John Edwards eventually proved to be too personally flawed in his private life to be a good candidate on a national ticket, but there wasn’t any bad stuff to be found by the most diligently thorought background examination back in 2004 – the cheating on wife Elizabeth-with-cancer occurred much later. Unlike John McCain’s fecklessly impulsive choice of Sarah Palin because she seemingly came in an attractively shiny package to attract voters – without any adequate examination of what was inside. That alone was a devastating indicator of the kinds of poor, impulsive decision-making McCain would have been prone to as President.
slippy
You’d think these worthless fucknozzles would want to talk to the man in charge.
But, then, that would mean being relevant and topical and our ass-tastic national media corps would then have to work for a living.
See, it’s easy to get an interview with the loser. He’s got all the time in the world to dick off and mumble on tv like he’s losing his goddamned mind.
Llelldorin
@ricky:
The GOP live down to the British stereotype of Americans: loud, uncultured, and prone to respond to bad situations by going off half-cocked. The BBC can put them on and relax in smug moral superiority.
Obama’s confusing to the BBC, because except for his skin tone he’s a stereotypical British politician–well-dressed, eloquent, intellectual, and prone to respond to bad situations by appointing a small committee that mulls over things interminably.
Mike in NC
WTF? McPOW didn’t get booked by Sesame Street?
Hob
I think it’s in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep— one of the goofy details that got left out of Blade Runner— where someone mentions that there are way more escaped androids out there than anyone suspects, and that a lot of them are now media people and celebrities of various kinds; as proof, they point out that the same guy has been appearing on different live radio shows every hour for more than 24 hours in a row and he’s not getting tired.
tomvox1
In giving this some thought, I think it could be that McCain represents a “Daddy” figure to a lot of these weenies in the press. He’s a war hero, someone who’s been in the shit at a time when very few elected officials have, and most of these milquetoasts, never having been in the military themselves, can’t help but idolize McCain no matter how much unadulterated contradictory bullshit he spews out. It’s like thinking your grandpa is the greatest guy ever because he won a Silver Star in Korea even though he’s just a bitter old crank to everyone else. I think it’s also somewhat related to this Patraeus for President talk that is like catnip to the Villagers. As happened with MacArthur, Powell and even Schwartzkopf, there is an element in the country–in no small part due to the sometimes breathless coverage of the media–that is always intrigued by drafting the general on the white horse to “rescue” the Republic from all the messiness of civilian governance.
I do wonder if the older generation of newsmen/women who were drafted and served, covered and sometimes fought in wars, ones who had the balls to question the Westmorlands and even the Pattons and MacArthurs of the world, had a more jaundiced and healthily less respectful approach to politicians, war heroes and war hero politicians. Probably then as now, only the really good ones…but perhaps there are less of them today than there used to be.
croatoan
This is just like in 2001, when Gore was all over the news all the time despite losing a much closer election. All I heard all day long is how great Gore was at this, or how wonderful Gore did that. Gore, Gore, Gore. Same thing happened in 2004 after Kerry lost a close election. It was “what do you think, guy-that-lost-the-election?” all the time.
geg6
@tomvox1:
This is why the only reporter on teevee I have any respect at all for is Richard Engel. I wish NBC would bring him back to cover these weenies in the Village today and we might have an actual reporter who knows something asking the questions. But then we’d never get decent coverage of anything happening in the Middle East because he’s the only one covering it from the actual streets. So I vote we clone him.
jackalope
I can’t believe people make fun of Schumer for this.
Schumer is on TV one-twentieth as much as McCain is. And, uh, Schumer is not only a Man with a Future, but he generally knows what the heck he’s talking about in terms of policy. Oh, and he’s actually able to get matters of consequence passed, as opposed to “tilts at pork-filled windmills” McCain.
And yet Schumer, not McCain, is the hackilicious media dilettante.
Okay, then.