Sick Media Pandering to McCain-the-Liar Express

I do my best to avoid television "news" shows. I skim the local paper on a daily basis. I also monitor a number of sites that screen and filter the international media in a way I never could.

I'm nauseated at the sycophancy the North American press shows for John McCain. It is critical that actual thinking people, those who don't simply lap up the swill offered by Matt Lauer, Chris Mathews, Tim Russert, and their ilk, routinely and loudly disseminate honest critique of the McCain misinformation-talking that the press is not. Besides what seem obvious campaign-financing law-breaking, this doofus seems to have no connection to reality in either the domestic or foreign policy spheres. If he was a Democrat, there's no question that the networks would be questioning whether he was mentally fit to run, never mind serve.

Of course a candidate with an "R" who actually did anything resembling military service does cause your eyes to blink, eh? It's ben a long time. Obviously he is also counting on the political-correctness concept that a POW could never be criticized. But what about that PC thing? Didn't the republics reject political correctness as a concept? I'm still trying to get clear how being encarcerated equates to heroism, wrestling again with political uncorrectness. We have a gazillion prisoners these days, right? Many of them actually illegally imprisoned, without representation. So any of them are probably equally "gifted" when it comes to that particular "qualification" for high office, right?

With time short, I will throttle myself in the interests of turning it over to Digby:

I wrote about this before, but I think it's worth reiterating. The "special relationship" between John McCain and the press is particularly dangerous in one respect: he is not held accountable for his words on the stump, (while Democrats' are used against them as if they'd carved them in stone from Mt Rushmore) and he's not held liable for his gross and obvious panders and policy shifts. I'm not sure I've ever seen a politician have this kind of industrial strength teflon before.

Dave Neiwert addressed this the other night over on FDL:

A lot of wags have been chortling about "the McCain Moment," myself included, because it encapsulates so neatly much of what's wrong with John McCain. But not everything.

We also need to deal with the McCain Of The Moment. The guy who said one thing six months ago and says nearly its opposite now. Who knows what he'll say in another six months?

As disturbing as his obvious mental lapses might be, McCain's bizarre policy flip-flops make Daffy Duck look positively stolid in comparison, especially because they have come in many cases in which he has made himself a national reputation. Things like torture and campaign finance ethics.

And this is especially the case with immigration. The co-author of the Kennedy-McCain Immigration Act -- which, comparatively speaking, took a moderate approach to immigration reform -- McCain is now saying that he wouldn't even vote for it today, let alone co-author it.

I think we all remember a fellow who was relentlessly called a "flip-flopper" for much less egregious and far more ancient policy shifts than that. Indeed, one of the truisms about presidential politics until now has been that Senators, particularly those with long legislative records, could not be elected because of votes they've taken in the past which were done for horse trading or positioning or some other reflection of sausage making that isn't easily explained. (You see it in the current Democratic race.)

St. McCain is different. When he makes a policy shift or takes a U-Turn in his rhetoric, or misrepresents his own record, it's excused by his fanboys in the media as something he "had to do." Here's Nick Kristoff on the subject:

... his pride in “straight talk” may arise partly because he is an execrable actor. When he does try double-talk, he looks so guilty and uncomfortable that he convinces nobody.

It’s also striking that Barack Obama is leading a Democratic field in which he has been the candidate who is least-scripted and most willing to annoy primary voters, whether in speaking about Reagan’s impact on history or on the suffering of Palestinians.

All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news.

It is true that Mr. McCain sometimes weaves and bobs. With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is. On Wednesday, for example, he retreated on his brave stand on torture by voting against a bill that would block the C.I.A. from using physical force in interrogations.

His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the onfederate flag as a “symbol of racism,” he embraced it as “a symbol of heritage.” To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles.”

In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

That sentiment is quite common among the punditocrisy and the media fanboys. They have talked themselves into believing that McCain's flip-flops and panders are actually a sign of his integrity and strength because he does them so blatantly. Now that's teflon.

The main thing at play here is a pernicious, primal narrative that's been out there for decades in which liberals are tarred as being sissies who can't stand up for the country. Therefore, when they "flipflop" they do it out of weakness of will and unformed identity. They are always trying to "find themselves." Conservatives have no such issues. They are always on the side of God, Mother, Country (and Wall Street) and don't care who knows it. Unlike those nancy boys on the left, they aren't small, flaccid and flip-flopping --- they are large, hard and straight-up. That's the long standing (ahem) narrative of liberal and conservative politics in the modern era and McCain is the perfect hero of the tale.

This is where all that bonhomie on the old Straight Talk Express really pays off. He can literally say anything and the press will excuse it because they think he's their cynical, postmodern pal --- a Rorschach test for their own beliefs. When he gets "angry" at lobbyists or rightwing ministers he's telling the truth. When he cozies up to lobbyists and seeks the endorsement of rightwing ministers, it's because he *has* to, (and he really, really hates doing it.) John McCain's heart, you see, is always in the right place, and oddly enough, everyone believes it's in the same place as is their own.

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