Ever since John McCain apparently ran out of 'get out of gaffe free' cards and was actually held to account for having more homes than he could keep track of, it has this blogger wondering if the traditional media might finally be ready to fairly report the facts and not the myths about our candidates. If so, CNN's dual "Revealed" episodes on both candidates the other night was a fair start in that direction. Besides actually asking McCain about his role in the Keating 5 scandal, they also confronted him about his multiple extramarital affairs. Watch it:
John Cole ties the affair, McCain's housing crisis, and what has been the media's Orwellian framing of elitism in this campaign all together and sums it up neatly:
Just so we are clear- visiting your grandmother while vacationing in Hawaii, the state where you were you were born- elitist.
Meeting the millionaire heiress daughter (who you will soon begin an affair with and divorce your first wife and then go on and buy a ton of houses) in Hawaii and then going on and honeymooning in Hawaii – not elitist.
Yes, McCain's affairs and charges of corruption in the Keating affair are old news to the villagers, but it's been so ignored and glossed over for so long by McCain's media that many voters today across the country have no idea about any of it. All we've been told for years now about McCain is that he's a maverick and a war hero, and yet we've been inundated with every scrap of negative reporting on Obama that could be dug up, no matter how tangential or untrue. Given the fact that the McCain campaign is now claiming that everything is "fair game" and vowing to rehash all of the tired old dirt on Obama brought up over and over for months during the primaries, it's past time the voters this cycle get a full accounting of both candidates' good, bad and ugly, so long as it's the truth.
Which brings me back to the affairs. A few months ago, when Mike Stark asked John McCain point blank if he had ever cheated on his current wife Cindy, McCain refused to answer. If McCain has never cheated on Cindy (say, with Vicki Iseman, for example), as he most certainly did with his first wife, Carol, why wouldn't he just answer with some straight talk? As Stark pointed out, "McCain surrogates furiously denounced the story, but oddly, John McCain never brought it up," and the traditional media collectively gave McCain a pass. Given his history, is a little follow up on that really too much to ask?
And since the McCain camp is calling everything fair game, Jed has a few more questions, in the interest of fairness, that likewise deserve reporting on:
If McCain wants to play this game, he should explain why he asked convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy -- who has advocated killing federal agents and said Adolf Hitler gave him strength -- to host a fundraiser for him in 1998.
McCain should also explain why he repeatedly voted against federal legislation banning domestic terrorism against patients, doctors, and staff of abortion and women's health clinics.
What else should we know more about McCain that we already would if it were about Obama?