{"id":16411,"date":"2008-07-30T10:40:30","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T14:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/16377.html"},"modified":"2008-07-30T10:40:30","modified_gmt":"2008-07-30T14:40:30","slug":"cutting-the-legs-out-from-under-mccains-landstuhl-smear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/cutting-the-legs-out-from-under-mccains-landstuhl-smear\/","title":{"rendered":"Cutting the legs out from under McCain’s Landstuhl smear"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the “credit where credit is due” file, I argued<\/a> the other day that news outlets were repeating the McCain campaign’s demonstrably false smear about Barack Obama and wounded U.S. troops in Germany, but neglecting to point out reality. As far as the public was concerned, McCain was making an attack; Obama said the attack is false. Who’s right? It’s apparently the media’s job to pass along press releases, not report the news.<\/p>\n

But I’m pleased to note that some outlets have been responsible about this. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell told viewers this week that the McCain campaign attack \u201cliterally is not true<\/a>.\u201d The NYT ran a decent story<\/a> yesterday, and the WaPo has a very good front-page item<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.<\/p>\n

The attacks are part of a newly aggressive McCain operation whose aim is to portray the Democratic presidential candidate as a craven politician more interested in his image than in ailing soldiers, a senior McCain adviser said. They come despite repeated pledges by the Republican that he will never question his rival’s patriotism.<\/p>\n

The essence of McCain’s allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so…. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event. […]<\/p>\n

A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama’s decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Confronted with reality, and the growing realization that they’d been caught blatantly lying to the media and the public, McCain campaign aides apologized yesterday for deliberately manufacturing a fictional smear.<\/p>\n

No, no, I’m just kidding. Confronted with reality, the McCain campaign continued to lie yesterday as if they hadn’t been caught orchestrating a massive scam.
\n<\/p>\n

Despite serious and repeated queries about the charge over several days, McCain and his allies continued yesterday to question Obama’s patriotism by focusing attention on the canceled hospital visit.<\/p>\n

McCain’s campaign released a statement from retired Sgt. Maj. Craig Layton, who worked as a commander at the hospital, who said: “If Senator Obama isn’t comfortable meeting wounded American troops without his entourage, perhaps he does not have the experience necessary to serve as commander in chief.”<\/p>\n

McCain’s advisers said they do not intend to back down from the charge, believing it an effective way to create a “narrative” about what they say is Obama’s indifference toward the military.<\/p>\n

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said again yesterday that the Republican’s version of events is correct, and that Obama canceled the visit because he was not allowed to take reporters and cameras into the hospital.<\/p>\n

“It is safe to say that, according to press reports, Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of those reasons,” he said. “We’re not making a leap here.”<\/p>\n

Asked repeatedly for the “reports,” Bounds provided three examples, none of which alleged that Obama had wanted to take members of the media to the hospital.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They’re lying, we know they’re lying, they know they’re lying, and they know that we know they’re lying. And yet, they lie anyway. Why? Because they “believe it an effective way to create a ‘narrative.'”<\/p>\n

For John McCain and his team of Karl Rove acolytes, it doesn’t matter if a smear is true, it matters if they can lead some people to think the smear might be true. Don’t bother them with details; they have a character to destroy.<\/p>\n

And perhaps most importantly, the honor-challenged Republican campaign has successfully executed a carefully-tailored plan. McCain’s gang ran the disgusting commercial “roughly a dozen<\/a>” times, and then waited for the media to pick it up and put it on the air for free, characterizing it as “tough” and “hard-hitting.” Millions of people ended up seeing and\/or hearing the lie, without the McCain campaign having to invest scarce resources. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Swiftboat liars did the exact same thing four years ago.)<\/p>\n

Political candidates of strong moral character do not do what John McCain is doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the “credit where credit is due” file, I argued the other day that news outlets were repeating the McCain campaign’s demonstrably false smear about Barack Obama and wounded U.S. troops in Germany, but neglecting to point out reality. As far as the public was concerned, McCain was making an attack; Obama said the attack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}