SCLM Missing in Action (Again)
When will the mainstream press — you know that ubiquitous “liberal media” we keep hearing tell of — shake themselves free of their enthralled love affair with “maverick” John McCain and actually start reporting in earnest on some of his more egregious flip-flops and catastrophic blunders? I mean aside from the highly partisan folks at Countdown that is?
Would it surprise you to learn that in addition to catting around on his crippled wife with a fetching young beer heiress, McCain was also a bigamist — at least in the sense that he had a marriage license with wife #2 before his divorce to #1 had been finalized? Although this was discretely mentioned in the LAT earlier in the week and caused some tittering amongst a few liberal blogs, can you imagine the relentless exposure this would get if it were Obama (or any other Democrat) and not McCain?
As John Avarosis put it:
Imagine if Barack Obama had two marriages at the same time. Imagine had Barack Obama lied about living with his first wife while having a mistress on the side. Imagine that all this happened while Obama had promised to speak out vocally about how gay people are a threat to marriage. We’d never hear the end of it from the Republicans and the media.
How exactly does McCain’s behaviour when he was an “amoral dingus” (to quote Wonkette), square exactly with the “family values” that Republicans are always mercilessly beating everyone else over the head with?
And what of McCain’s utterly bizarre revision to his own autobiography last week? Campaigning in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, on Wednesday McCain told Pittsburgh TV station KDKA that he recited the names of the Steelers defensive linemen when he was asked under interrogation for the name of his squadron mates.
When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the physical pressures that were on me, I named the starting lineup — defensive line — of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates!
It’s a great story, but there’s one tiny problem — it’s not true. When McCain was shot down, the Steelers were one of the worst teams in the NFL, in a stretch of six straight losing seasons. As a navy man stationed on aircraft carriers around the world, McCain would have been highly unlikely to have ever seen the mid-60s Steelers play a game.
Moreover, in his own autobiography Faith of Our Fathers, McCain claimed that the names of the starting lineup he passed off as squad mates to his Vietnamese captors were those of the Green Bay Packers!
In the book he wrote: “Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line…” When his life story was made into an A&E cable TV movie in 2005, the Green Bay version of the story was acted out, complete with the names from the Packers’ 1967 defensive lineup: “Starr; Greg; McGee; Davis; Adderly; Brown; Ringo; Wood,” the movie McCain repeated.
Maybe it’s not a big deal, but it’s definitely more than a little weird to needlessly prevaricate about something that’s so essential to McCain’s “character” one would think. His campaign sloughed it off as nothing more than “an honest mistake” which seems like a highly implausible excuse all considered. More likely it was a case of shameless pandering and as such, doesn’t that speak to McCain’s integrity? Surely it would be spun that way if it were anyone else. The alternative would be to regard it as yet another example of McCain’s shoddy memory — or “a senior moment” as Fox News anchor Britt Hume charitably called it when the so-called “expert” on the Middle East repeatedly confused Shia and Sunni factions in Iraq.
When Obama mistakenly credited his great-uncle, Charlie Payne, as being among the U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, the RNC seized on this gaffe issuing a memo saying that Obama’s “frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.” Shouldn’t that same standard apply to John McCain? Not according to our drowsy press corps it seems.