‘He’s talking rubbish and he should not get away with it’

April 5, 2007

CNN’s Michael Ware isn’t the only major network journalist denouncing John McCain’s recent nonsense about allegedly safe areas of Baghdad; CBS News foreign correspondent Allen Pizzey has been nearly as critical. Pizzey, who’s based out of Rome, talked to Brian Montopoli today, who asked whether the senator’s comments bothered journalists in Iraq.

Yes. It’s disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It’s electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.

Now, McCain and some other senators were there on Sunday, and they claimed, “Oh, we walked around for a whole hour…and we drove in from the airport. Gosh, aren’t we great, we drove in from the airport.” Excuse me, Mr. McCain, you drove in in a large convoy of heavily armed vehicles. The last one had a sign on it saying “Keep back 100 yards. Deadly force authorized.” Every single car that they approached or passed pulled over and stopped, because that’s the way it is. When one of those security details goes by, every ordinary person gets the hell out of the way, in case they get shot.

If he did walk around that market, and I didn’t see him do it, and he didn’t announce he was going to do it, you can bet your life there were an awful lot of soldiers deployed to make sure that nobody came near that place. He’s talking rubbish. And he should not get away with it.

When the right went after CNN’s Ware, there was a degree of shock involved. How dare a journalist tell an American audience that a senator is lying. Don’t reporters know that they’re supposed to simply pass along what politicians say, and let the audience that has no way of knowing the truth or all the facts come to their own conclusions?

But that’s what makes the McCain story so interesting. Reporters weren’t just aware of McCain’s transparent and jaw-dropping mendacity, they were offended by it.

Good. If the media were willing to call “b.s.” more often, news outlets would probably have a lot more credibility right now.

You mean everyone on the planet is not supposed to kowtow to an American Senator?

But this is the greatest country in the history of the world.

Better: We are the good guys!
Looky: McCain even has white hair under his white hat!

You want to call bullshit on that?

  • According to a commenter at Red State, the problem isn’t necessarily that they called bull on McCain, but that they never do it to Democrats. So until they start calling bull on Democrats, they’re not allowed to do so to Republicans and they’ll denounce any reporter who does so. It’s a strange, strange world those people live in.

  • The headline of this post is also applicable to another fine senator, Orrin Hatch.

  • “He’s talking rubbish. And he should not get away with it.”

    And yet he will. Because the media is so “liberal”.

    Right now if you check Google News for hits on “hatch clinton campaign Lam” you get exactly six hits. ZERO major media are calling Hatch on his BS about Lam being Clinton’s campaign manager. Hatch even tried to retract the most blatant lie he told, and still no media coverage.

    Rachael Maddow has this:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-maddow/an-open-letter-to-senator_b_45024.html

  • McCain is being called for his statement because he does not have the support of the moguls who run the news media. They have already decided that McCain will not be president so why protect him?

  • I think the Republican Party should break precedence in 2008 and hold their national convention outside of the boundaries of the United States… in Baghdad. The GOP should do that, to prove to the world that Iraq has been made safe for democracy.

  • “He’s talking rubbish. And he should not get away with it.”

    I’d love to hijack the crawl on the major “networks” and just run that line through about half of their programming.

  • McClueless and Hack both have long, well-documented, and well-known histories of being shameless liars and/or clueless dopes, depending on the subject they’re trying to obfuscate. The real tragedy is that most Americans are unaware of the near-constant mendacity of these two Republicans. They’re so bad it’s as if they are trying to parody themselves or parodize the stereotypical specious middlebrow Senator.

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