Thread: Obamania
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Old 03-24-2008, 09:12 PM   #143 (permalink)
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When Clinton or Obama says something, there is throrough fact checking and scrutiny from the press:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us...cs&oref=slogin

The press coverage of McCain, however, is a deliberate free pass from the press. They explain away or minimize any signifigance relating to his frequent gaffes, so he doesn't have to do it himself, and then, they move on....forget about it....

Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23766063/page/5/
Meet the Press' transcript for March 23, 2008

Maria Bartiromo, Erin Burnett, Jon Meacham, Peggy Noonan, Eugene Robinson, Chuck Todd

....MR. RUSSERT: Chuck Todd, John McCain has been traveling in Europe and in the Middle East.

MR. TODD: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: Had some problems when he was in Jordan, he talked about al-Qaeda being trained by the Iranians.

MR. TODD: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: And then, then Lindsey Graham, who he was with, and then Joe Lieberman both tried to say to him, al-Qaeda is Sunni, not trained by the Shiite Iranian government. Does that kind of stumble hurt a McCain candidacy?

MR. TODD: Well, what's odd about the, the stumble is that it--is it a stumble or was it, or was it that this talking point that he'd been, that he'd been using for actually a couple weeks or over a week, where he was talking about sort of almost blurring that the, the enemy of al-Qaeda and the enemy of the, the Shia-trained Iranians and sort of blurring them as one enemy. And the, the question is, did he just sort of--he truncated it to the point where he ended up misspeaking. The, the problem, of course, McCain has is that he can't, you know, he doesn't want to make it so that he, he forgot it for a minute. You know, he's--because of the age issue, he can't ever look like he's having a senior moment. <h3>So instead, he's better off going ahead and saying, you know, OK, so he misspoke. Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, "Oh, he says he's Mr. Experience. Doesn't he know the difference between this stuff?" He's got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it'd have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem</h3> for a couple of days for them....
...and
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030202108.html

...I thought that was an odd comment from Sen. McCain, and I do think that it would have gotten a lot more attention were it not coming from someone who is generally judged to have a lot of foreign policy expertise . . . . <h3>Probably won't break through the chatter, and I agree, would be a bigger deal if the speaker had been different.</h3>
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ain/index.html

......One can acknowledge that all of the topics on which the Meet the Press panel harped endlessly are legitimate topics to discuss. But by comparison to those petty sideshows, consider the towering significance of what McCain was really doing all of last week and even before that.

The vast bulk of the country believes they were deliberately deceived about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq. And a principal reason why we ended up in Iraq is because the Bush administration was permitted to spew all sorts of falsehoods about the Iraqi threat while the media uncritically passed along those falsehoods, depicting Bush officials as Serious, honorable national security protectors whose word could be trusted and whose knowledge was beyond questioning.

And now -- by their own admission -- they're doing exactly the same thing with McCain. These Iran/Al Qaeda episodes occurred when McCain was traveling around the Middle East with his closest ally, warmonger Joe Lieberman -- who has already explicitly advocated an American military attack on Iran -- and it involved McCain's repeatedly making patently false assertions in order to tie Iran to Al Qaeda and to exaggerate wildly the Iranian threat, exactly the sort of deceit that misled large majorities of Americans into believing that Saddam was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

And then, when McCain gets caught doing this, <h3>the establishment press corps comes right out and admits that they barely even consider it a real story because it was something that was done by John McCain, as opposed to Clinton, Obama or some Unserious liberal war opponent.</h3> It was just a momentary "stumble" that can't possibly call into question something as certain and beyond reproach as McCain's expertise and honor.

Garden-variety media criticism consists of nothing more than each side just reflexively complaining, with little or no proof, that their side is being treated unfairly. But with McCain, that exercise is unnecessary. Journalists themselves continuously acknowledge without much shame that they treat McCain differently, and better, because they have such a high opinion of him. Here's what Time's Ana Marie Cox told Howie Kurtz earlier this year:

"The journalists who covered McCain in 2000 <h3>feel very self-conscious about the criticism that the press came under for apparently being so taken with John McCain.</h3> There's a sense that the first time was so fun and exciting, but this time we're really going to be sober and critical and the dispassionate observers we're supposed to be."

That rehabilitative project doesn't seem to be working out too well. While media stars focus incessantly on petty Democratic surrogate wars and what Time's Michael Scherer aptly calls "phony second-degree scandals," here is John McCain serially engaging in a replica of the worst and most destructive behavior of the Bush administration -- <h3>spewing outright falsehoods about a country that he may attack and which his most stalwart allies want to attack -- and journalists have decided that it's not newsworthy because McCain is far too good, smart and honest to be depicted in such unflattering terms</h3>, just like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were.........
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2000964_5.html
Media Notes
Howard Kurtz

Obama's Speech, Sliced and Diced

...Speaking of McCain, A.J. Rossmiller at Americablog jumps on his gaffe of saying Iran was training al-Qaeda operatives, which the senator corrected a moment later:

"McCain is at it again, this time telegraphing his profound lack of understanding of the regional dynamics. He recently claimed, multiple times, that Iran is training al Qaeda elements from Iraq. Iran, of course, is a Shia theocracy, and al Qaeda a Sunni terrorist group. This is like claiming that the RNC is training Democratic congressional candidates. Seriously -- this is a HUGE error. Not a single other government official or expert has claimed anything like this. It wasn't a momentary gaffe or slip; again, he said it multiple times. It's increasingly clear that he truly doesn't understand the situation . . . five years into the war."

A blunder, to be sure, <h3>but can the Democratic candidates really argue that they know more about foreign policy? ...</h3>
Is Mccain's campaign paying these pathetic assholes who claim that they are "journalists", to shill for the candidate?

Last edited by host; 03-24-2008 at 09:44 PM..
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