In journalism, it’s a safe bet that if you write a story with the suggestion that a prominent male politician is bedding an attractive female lobbyist, whatever other point you hoped to make will be overlooked.
That appears to have been the case with the New York Times article on Feb. 21, which led with suspicions held by some McCain staffers that the Arizona senator had gotten too cozy with lobbyist Vicky Iseman. The Times story then veered off into a historical examination of McCain’s over-confidence about his own moral rectitude.
Yet, despite the Times’ best efforts to explore this complicated history of McCain as both ethics sinner and ethics reformer, the public and pundits never got much past the sex angle, an insinuation that McCain, 71, and Iseman, 40, both adamantly denied.
Thus, McCain succeeded in deflecting the story’s more significant question: Is McCain’s reputation as a straight-talking politician a sham?
Put differently, is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – like Colin Powell – a media darling whose reputation for honesty is largely undeserved? The question is not an insignificant one.
In 2003, Secretary of State Powell exploited his sterling image to help mislead the nation into the Iraq War.
Now, McCain hopes his “straight-talk-express” appeal will help keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.
So, there’s urgency for Americans to know whether John McCain is a sanctimonious phony and a self-assured liar, who’s just masquerading as the guy who tells it like it is and disdains the self-serving ways of Washington.
Evidence of Lies
Though no new evidence has surfaced about McCain and Iseman as a romantic item, McCain’s blanket denial about assisting Iseman and other lobbyists is fast disintegrating.
As we noted in an article on Feb. 21, McCain’s assertion in response to the Times article — that during his quarter-century congressional career, he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” — just isn’t true.
For instance, the Times story recalled how McCain helped one of his early financial backers, wheeler-dealer Charles Keating, frustrate oversight from federal banking regulators who were examining Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
At Keating’s urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory board. In 1987, McCain joined several other senators in two private meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating’s behalf.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/is-john-mccain-a-liar-by-robert-parry/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
