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McCain’s Landstuhl attack ‘literally is not true’

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The McCain campaign has spent much of the past four days aggressively pushing a bogus smear, accusing Barack Obama of blowing off wounded U.S. troops in Germany. The goal, apparently, is to get the media to pick up on this story — despite the fact that the attack is demonstrably false — so the fabricated “controversy” will be part of the public discussion, without the McCain campaign having to spend a lot of money.

And, predictably, many news outlets are largely playing along. A variety of outlets are noting the attacks, without telling the public that the attacks are factually wrong. An MSNBC on-air personality falsely suggested that Obama did not “visit wounded American troops” during his overseas trip. Pat Buchanan said the same thing. A Fox News personality repeated the smear as if it were true.

And, voila, we have a “story.” As Atrios noted, “[I]t is truly inexplicable how something becomes ‘an issue’ when, prompted by a false ad from the McCain campaign aimed at members of the media, media figures repeat false charges.”

To her credit, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who was with the Obama campaign during the trip, has taken the lead in reporting reality. Yesterday, she told viewers that the McCain attack “literally is not true.”

Now, if you watch the interview, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), a prominent McCain ally, changes the smear a little bit. He doesn’t defend the McCain campaign’s ridiculous ad, and he seems to concede that the Pentagon intervened to prevent Obama from visiting the troops at Landstuhl.

But Burr alters the attack by suggesting Obama should have ignored the Pentagon and blown off the Defense Department’s rules.

This is a bit of a twist, isn’t it? The argument isn’t that Obama blew off the troops, it’s that the Pentagon intervened and Obama should have stood his ground and gone to Landstuhl anyway.

There are a couple of problems here. First, try to imagine the response if Obama, in the midst of an overseas campaign swing, ignored the Pentagon and used the troops as political props. We would never hear the end of it, but that’s effectively what the McCain gang now believes Obama should have done.

Second, the hypocrisy here is breathtaking. McCain was scheduled to visit a military base in April during a campaign swing, the Pentagon said that would violate Defense Department rules, and McCain didn’t go. Aide Steve Schmidt told CNN, “We follow the rules.”

In other words, the McCain campaign has launched a demonstrably ridiculous four-day smear because Obama followed the exact same Pentagon rules that McCain did.

Before we leave this “story” altogether, I’d just add that Col. Katherine Scheirman, the retired Chief of Medical Operations for United States Air Force in Europe Headquarters at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, issued a statement yesterday that’s worth reading:

“John McCain’s new ad is dishonest and shameful, and I say that as the former Chief of Medical Operations. Senators Hagel and Reed confirmed to Bob Schieffer yesterday that Senator Obama visited the Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad as a part of their CODEL, with no media present.

“In Germany, Senator Obama made the right decision to respect wounded troops, and the doctors and nurses doing crucial and time-sensitive work, by not making a visit that was characterized as a campaign event by the Pentagon. Senator Obama should be thanked for putting our military above politics. And, I would hope that John McCain would think in those same terms, the next time he is put in a similar situation.

“Senator Obama has voted for the troops when John McCain has not, most recently on the new GI Bill. I am happy that Senator Obama puts the welfare of our troops above politics.”

Comments

  • SickofBushMcCainLiebermann

    says:

    Next thing he’s going to accuse Obama of not getting skin cancer…

    This monkey see monkey do crap has gotta stop. BO needs to rop the BOmb on the McSame campaign.

    Obama has been vetted by senior military personal, economic advisors and thousands of people.
    McCain runs ads that show him 20 years younger ( does he have a time machine?….um…no my friends.) and lobs ad hominem attack ads.
    Hey McNasty stay outta the sun…Irish skin burns in Arizona!

  • Racer X

    says:

    Is it just me, or is her overuse of the term “literally” really annoying / insipid?

    But…it’s time to do something I never thought I would ever be able to do; Thank a major MSM figure for calling a lie a lie.

    What strikes me is how she is able to call BS on McCain’s false statement because she was there (travelling with Obama’s entourage). Apparently she’s only able to determine facts if she sees them in person. The lack of professionalism in her defense of Obama will no doubt cause the wingnuts to go nuts, hopefully they will bust loose on her and she’ll see up close and personal the kind of nutcases who want McCain elected.

  • SaintZak

    says:

    Obama has conducted himself with alot of dignity, but he really needs to stamp this out hard now. This is how Kerry got stuck in a tar pit he couldn’t get out of. McCain has, in effect, gotten awaay with it this time. He’s gotten a ton of free air time to create a story thats false. If the Obama camp thinks its over they better guess again. this is just the start. He needs to get rough…not sleazy and dirty like McCain, but he needs to come down hard on McCain.

  • TomB

    says:

    Ads like these are low-hanging fruit for reporters – a story is there for the plucking. A good editor, however, might conclude that instead of following all the other monkeys, she could climb a different path to find better and more fruit. The other path would be to report on the falseness of the ad (which they did) and then confront McCain himself about why he would approve such an ad (instead of getting a reaction from the Obama campaign and/or talking to McCain surrogates.)

    Media should remember that their clients are their viewers/readers. And that client wants the media to add value to news by making sure that what they’re reporting is not just passing along bad information because “it’s out there.”

  • Bernard HP Gilroy

    says:

    but that’s effectively what the McCain gang now believes Obama should have done.

    No, this is what the McCain says they now believe. It’s pretty clear
    clear that they don’t in fact believe it.

    Or, perhaps more to the point, this is what they wish Senator Obama had done. That way they’d be able to make a much more devastating attack.

  • Bernard HP Gilroy

    says:

    TomB @ 4:

    Media should remember that their clients are their viewers/readers.

    Actually, this is the real problem with US media today: They are quite aware who their clients are, that is to say, the advertisers who pay them. Their job is to deliver eyeballs, not truth. Since controversy draws viewers, they do controversy — and a fake one is as good as, or even better than, a real one.

  • NonyNony

    says:

    Bernard Gliroy –

    Yup. You’re exactly right. And the lack of outcry over CBS’s editing of Couric’s interview with McCain last week essentially proves that the free market is broken when it comes to journalism. In almost any other market, competitors would have been swarming like sharks to pick up viewers after that breach of trust. As one example, when Mattel had the toy recalls earlier this year, Hasbro started running TV ads about how how safe their products were. It was part damage control (assure the public that you’re not in the same boat as Mattel) and part getting a leg up on their competition.

    If the market for news were healthy, NBC, ABC, FOX, CNN and even the major newspapers would be flogging that digital manipulation of Couric’s interview to death – at the very least their advertising departments should be having a field day with it. Yet there’s silence. The so-called “free market” that we have for journalism is a failed model and something needs to be done to replace it.

  • CJ

    says:

    McCain/Rove play the media and the electorate like a well-tuned instrument. The Rove approach is to continually keep the opponent on defense…the legitimacy of the attack is neither here nor there. It works because it’s not just McCain that’s involved…the attack, regardless of merit, becomes a Republican talking point that we here over and over until it becomes conventional wisdom.

    The traditional media is nearly obsolete as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I won’t renew my newspaper subscription because of their heavy use of AP’s McCain-leaning reporting.

  • njpucks

    says:

    Even HuffPo got it wrong. They posted a story over the weekend about Obama canceling the troop visit and reporting the facts incorrectly, making it look like an Obama gaff, and feeding into this non-issue of a story. They have since taken it down.. but the damage is done… One thing I learned in J school… check your sources… check your sources… check your sources!! What? You don’t need to know anything about journalism to be on TV?

  • SteveT

    says:

    SaintZak said:
    Obama has conducted himself with alot of dignity, but he really needs to stamp this out hard now. This is how Kerry got stuck in a tar pit he couldn’t get out of. McCain has, in effect, gotten awaay with it this time.

    Exactly right.

    As sophisticated as the Obama campaign has been, they still have a huge blind spot — they believe that the corporate-controlled media is fair, professional, and interested in reporting the truth. The success of Fox News and ‘Crossfire’-style shouting matches has killed the idea of “journalism ethics”. Journalism’s model is now “balanced” coverage.

    Instead of having reporters actually do enough reporting to inform Americans about an issue, the corporate-controlled media has found that there’s more profit in entertaining Americans. So they set up a WWE Grudge Matches, where articulate (and pushy) advocates from two “sides” of issues talk past each other, tossing out “gotcha” one-linersand and trying to shout each other down.

    The corporate-controlled media frame the “debate” according to which side makes the more outlandish (and entertaining) claim. So SaintZak is correct. The Obama campaign has lost this debate. The corporate-controlled media has decided that the question to be debated is the question that McCain campaign put forward — “Was it a mistake for Obama to decide not to visit with wounded soldiers while in Germany?”

    It’s too late for facts to change the debate. McCain not visiting wounded soldiers back in April is “ancient history”, so it won’t be reported. The Pentagon’s role, and particularly the Bush administration’s role, in blocking Obama’s visit will be dismissed as spin because Obama chose to take the high road and downplayed that story at first.

    Obama and his campaign need to get real. If they play by the rules they’re going to lose. I was encouraged earlier this year when Obama said that if his campaign opponent pulls a knife, he would pull out a gun.

    Well the knives have come out.

    I’m not suggesting that Obama or his surrogates completely sacrifice their integrity and abandon the truth. They should never tell a falsehood, mostly because it’s the right thing to do but also because the corporate-controlled media uses different standards for Democrats and Republicans. But this election is too important to take a chance of losing because the Republicans pull out another “Swift Boat” campaign.

    The Obama campaign has to be aware that any little thing can and will be spun into negative stories about them. They will have to respond immediately and provocatively to everything.

    Obama didn’t want to his successful trip to be overshadowed by a story about the Pentagon playing politics. Well guess what . . . . The entire, incredibly successful week is being all but ignored because the corporate-controlled media is focused on debating whether it a mistake for Obama to decide not to visit with wounded soldiers while in Germany.

    My suggestion (admittedly after the fact) about how Obama should have handled the issue: have one of his staff privately tell one of the network reporters on the trip that Obama was “fuming” because “political interference by the Pentagon” prevented him from visiting wounded soldiers. The real story would be out, Obama would look like a victim and he still appears above “dirty politics”.

  • kevo

    says:

    McCain’s campaign is as undemocratic as the Bush Administration has been these past 7+ years. Its our way or the highway interpretations of the events unfolding this campaign season that mark the McCain camp. Their sentiment leads to goalpost moving, capricious rhetoric that belies our needs as a people and a nation, and in the end it ends up being expressed as a shrill screed against anything and anyone who would dare disagree with the McCain campaign’s views of what is indeed happening before our eyes.

    Good luck to them this time around! They’ll need it! McCain gets beat in November is my call. -Kevo

  • zeitgeist

    says:

    we are seeing, i’m afraid, what i was concerned about all along with Obama’s push for a new kind of “above the fray” politics. why he is not hitting back a lot harder on all of the utterly spurious junk coming from the McCain camp the last week is beyond me – the drilling pitch, the Landstuhl attack, the ‘premature victory lap’ nonsense – all of these (or perhaps collectively) seem to me to be getting traction and taking a toll. the failure to respond looks too much like Kerry and the Swiftboaters to me. i’m sure some will say “but he is responding – he is issuing statements, it is on his fact-checking web page, surrogates are saying the right things”; as someone who follows this stuff closer than the average voter, I can tell you it isn’t getting through the clutter. Either Obama himself will have to hit back, because he gets covered (and the media will enjoy the fight) or they will have to use paid media to ensure an untrammelled message.

  • Prup (aka Jim Benton)

    says:

    ALL media — except for a few magazines, NPR, and Pacifica — is advertising-supported and always has been. There used to be a rule of thumb that what you paid for a newspaper covered the cost of the paper it was printed on — and that was all. (With the price of paper having risen, this isn’t true, it doesn’t cover even that.) All the other costs, from reporters’ salaries to the cost of toilet paper in the bathrooms comes from advertising.

    The same with television. You aren’t charged by the minute, what you watch isn’t monitored so that the stations you watch could get the appropriate fraction of the money you pay the satellite company.

    It’s even true with the Internet. You don’t get charged everytime you visit TCR, the money comes out of Steve’s pocket (CONTRIBUTE, damnyez) with a slight offset from the advertising you may (or may not) see on the site.

    Want it to change? Ready to pay ten times what you do for tv? Ready to pay $10.00 a copy for your morning sports section? Want to get charged $1.00 everytime you look in on how the Mets are doing?

    This is not something new. It has always been like that. The one saving grace is that advertisers are usually uninterested in the content of what they support — unless it gives them a black eye (see Savage, Michael). What matters is the number of viewers — as judged by the rather absurd ratings system that is used. (It used to make a small amount of sense when there were 7 channels to choose from. With 500 channels, it has lost all credibility.)

    Btw, it would be easy to set up an efficient ratings system — simply by monitoring EVERYBODY’s tv viewing, keeping track of exactly who watches what. Can you imagine the screams that would go on here about privacy if somebody tried to implement that?

    As for the idea that ‘the MSM is trying to make it a close race so they can bring in the big bucks” WRONG!! If this is true at all, it’s in reverse. They are trying to minimize the loss of viewers that politcal coverage causes in general. Most people AREN’T political junkies like us. They’d rather watch dramas and sports, not news. (Why do you think the Sunday Morning talk shows are on Sunday mornings and not in prime time? Because that’s a time when not many people are watching, so tv can ‘do it’s duty’ without losing money.) Believe me, the papers and news channels are praying for a juicy celebrity sex and murder scandal so they can get their viewers up.

  • Goldilocks

    says:

    Giving maybe unjustified benefit of the doubt to the Obama campaign, it seems possible that they are letting the mCcain gang show their colors, play all their cards, and then clobber them after the conventions when it really matters in the last couple of months. Or is that wishful thinking? I guess time will tell.

  • Steve

    says:

    The counterpunch to this whole mess is simple. Obama changed his plans because of DoD rules. McLie thinks Obama is wrong for following the rules.

    OBAMA = FOLLOWING THE RULES
    McLIE = BREAKING THE RULES

  • Racer X

    says:

    Prup, the MSM is praying for celebrity murders AND a close race. Those are exclusive by any means.

    “They are trying to minimize the loss of viewers that politcal coverage causes in general.”

    Yes, by making the race seem as close as possible. Close races get eyeballs, blowouts don’t.

  • SteveT

    says:

    Prup (aka Jim Benton) said:
    ALL media — except for a few magazines, NPR, and Pacifica — is advertising-supported and always has been.

    I listen regularly to NPR, and I have to say that it is most definitely supported by advertising. The only difference is that the commercials come in the form of “sponsored by” announcements. But they’re still commercials which name the company, describe their products and repeat their slogan.

    I’ve never believed that the corporate-controlled news media is trying to keep this election close to drive up ratings. I’ve said repeatedly that that most news reporting is neither liberal nor conservative. The news media’s bias is toward “conventional wisdom” and preserving the status quo.

    The conventional wisdom is that McCain is a “maverick” and a “straight-talker.” The news media refuses to abandon those “truths”, no matter how much the “maverick” embraces traditional Republican ideology and how often the “straight-talker” flip-flops on issues from one day to the next. Conventional wisdom says that Republicans are the party that is “strong” on national security and is “fiscally responsible”, and so, in spite of the evidence of the past seven years, the news media frames the debate on those issues in terms of “Is this or that Democrat as ‘strong as the Republicans’ on national security or deficit reduction?”

    The news media defends the status quo of a “two party system” by ignoring third parties. They defend status quo of the corporate-controlled, Wall Street-driven economy by reporting the Dow-Jones Average as the only economic indicator and report every other economic number is reported only in terms of how it affects the Dow-Jones Average.

    Conventional Wisdom can only be changed when Democrats start challenging Republican ideas instead of merely challenging individual Republicans. And they need to expect and anticipate the push-back by the corporate-controlled media.

  • MsJoanne

    says:

    I have to say, not only does Steve do a fantastic job with this blog, but I am HONORED to be here with all of you.

    The above are some of the finest comments I have seen with such insight and thought.

    While I may not always agree with everyone, damn I am proud to be a part of this community!

    Thank you all!

    (ok, back to your regularly scheduled comments)

  • MsJoanne

    says:

    Look, once CBS edited McCain’s words, there was no going back. A lie thrice told became a complete free for all. Media is for naught. It’s pointless and just outright silly.

    Why McCain even bothers to speak is beyond me.

    Just let the networks and pundits take over. They are all better prepared than he is and they will make up whatever they want anyway.

    That most American’s wont ever know. Oh well. 230+ years was a nice run.

  • Grumpy

    says:

    Yesterday, she told viewers that the McCain attack “literally is not true.”

    Meaning the McCain attack is true in some other sense. Sure, Obama may not have literally blown off the wounded troops, but he did so spiritually.

  • st john

    says:

    And Andrea Mitchell is married to whom?
    Just wanted to insert the disclaimer, lest we think there is literally no alternative motive, here.
    I am committed to Oneness through Justice and Transformation
    peace,
    st john

  • joey

    says:

    Rather than being outraged and angry about the obvious McCain smearing LIE ad it would be great if, when asked about the ad, Obama merely shook his head and laughed out loud at it’s ridiculousness and then pointed out that he believes the media is smart enough to know when they are being insulted, when they are being used to promote obvious propaganda which is both desperate and truth deprived. Treat it like a cheap desperate attempt coming from a vile contemptible character who has sold his integrity who thinks the press is to stupid to see through it.

    Obama does have a history of visiting with wounded soldiers without camers and press…something McCain has never done.
    The Media owners all have an agenda: Heres a link:
    http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html
    Check out the links on that page also. One gets a different view of our establishment media. This election is our last chance (I believe) because of the overwhelming majority’s support to change the country’s direction that the election could not even be legitimately stolen. Break through the door and flood the congress and remain watchful because this may be the last chance to get it done…change the country’s direction.