Setting the record straight on McCain's lie about Rumsfeld.
|
(Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:42:32 -0500) ---
March 6th, 2008
Setting the record straight on McCain and Rumsfeld
One of the more outlandish claims John McCain routinely makes on the
campaign trail is his boast that he called for Donald Rumsfeld’s
ouster before he resigned.
Part of the problem with the bogus claim is that major media
personalities believe the claim, and keep passing it on to national
audiences as if it were true.
On the March 5 edition of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer
asked about Sen. John McCain:
“[C]an he disassociate himself … distance himself from the president?”
After CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said it would be “[t]otally
impossible,” CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger responded:
“[B]ut on the war, McCain has said over and over again, you know, ‘I
would have fired [former Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld.’ ”
When Toobin interrupted, asking:
“Did he call for Rumsfeld to be fired?” Blitzer said “Yes” and Borger
agreed, saying:
“He did. He did.”
Despite Toobin’s further protestations, Borger said of McCain’s
purported call for Rumsfeld to be fired:
“[H]e called for him to be fired while — in the Senate,” “Yeah. Oh,
absolutely,” “No, he did,” and “[H]e said I think Rumsfeld ought to be
fired, you know, a long time ago. Yeah.”
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that Blitzer and Borger have heard
McCain make the claim, and they assume he’s telling the truth.
Of course, if Blitzer and Borger were better journalists, they’d
actually check to see if McCain’s claim was accurate before repeating
the lie for a national television audience, but my hunch is, they both
think, “McCain wouldn’t just make something like that up. He keeps
saying it, so it must be true.”
It’s part of the larger problem of McCain’s media adulation — there’s
simply no skepticism.
They accept his “straight-talking” persona, which they’ve helped
manufacture, at face value.
With this in mind, it’s worth setting the record straight.
Every time McCain claims credit for calling for Rumsfeld’s ouster,
he’s not telling the truth.
The WaPo’s Peter Baker, to his enormous credit, recently did a little
fact checking.
As he gets closer to the Republican nomination, Sen. John McCain has
been trying to balance his unqualified support for the Iraq war by
reminding audiences that he was also a tough critic of how it was
managed until President Bush finally changed strategies a year ago.
In recent weeks, McCain has gone so far as to tell audiences that he
was “the only one” who called for Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation as
defense secretary.
The trick is that he never did, at least not publicly.
The senator from Arizona was a tough critic of Rumsfeld and more than
once said that he had no confidence in the Pentagon chief in the two
years before Bush finally dumped Rumsfeld in November 2006.
But even as he was criticizing Rumsfeld, McCain typically stopped
short of calling for the Pentagon chief to step down.
While campaigning in Fort Myers, Fla., on Jan. 26, he told a crowd:
“In the conflict that we’re in, I’m the only one that said we have to
abandon the Rumsfeld strategy — and Rumsfeld — and adopt a new
strategy.”
Four days later during a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library in Simi Valley, Calif., aired on CNN, McCain said, “I’m the
only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go.”
A McCain spokesman acknowledged this week that that was not correct.
Great, McCain aides are willing to admit that McCain is wrong, but
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger aren’t.
As it happens, I understand McCain’s motivation for trying to deceive
people.
For his efforts to define himself as a vocal critic of the Bush
administration’s failures in Iraq, McCain has been a cheerleader for
the war for six years.
Far from denouncing Rumsfeld’s strategy, McCain was praising it —
telling Americans in 2004, “I’m confident we’re on the right course,”
and insisting in 2005 that we must “stay the course.”
McCain is no doubt embarrassed by his record, so he has to try to
manufacture a new one and hope that no one notices.
Why Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger seem intent on helping him, though,
remains a mystery.
_________________________________________________
No mystery. It's yer "Liberal" media, folks.
Harry
Harry Hope (rivrvu@ix.netcom.com).
|
You may contact Vunet.org staff via E-mail address (MSN, Yahoo! or email) :
">Contact Us.
 print article
text version
|
|
www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com
Give article a thumb up.
My favorite Vunet video is (Suosikki videoni Vunetissa on) ...
readers picks
watch music videos
write comment for this video
go to random article
join mailing list