Like many of us who saw last night’s love-fest, the Al Smith Dinner in New York, I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance. They were making nicey as McCain’s campaign had initiated a hateful and venomous robocall campaign to brand Barack Steve Obama a terrorist. I suppose they’re all professionals, and view any attempt to cajole the unwashed into buying a product as fair game.
So Glenn Greenwald has a nice piece, Poor John McCain: Forced against his honor to run an ugly campaign, over at Salon. (It will only be there for a while before it rolls off the page.) He talks about another disconnect – that a man who is running such a dishonorable campaign as McCain is really an honorable and decent guy. The man has a loyal pack of sycophantic journalists following him, and they are totally forgiving of his wretched behavior. He’s generally avoided hard questions – he did face them last night on Letterman. (Odd thing about our culture – it’s the comedians who are doing the journalists’ work.) And Greenwald links to an obscure news station in Maine where a local reporter grilled McCain. A local reporter – the guys and gals on the Straight Talk Express are busy kissing his ass.
Tim Dickinson did a hit piece on John McCain in Rolling Stone that I thought was a bit over the top. Mainstream journalists will tut-tut such work, and yet let slide all of their own fawning over McCain. It took Dave Letterman to ask him about G. Gordon Liddy, a Maine reporter to confront him with Sarah Palin’s deficiencies, and the women of the View to point out to him that his campaign commercials are lies.
In the meantime, Greenwald writes about Time Magazine’s Ana Marie Cox (who says “I adore the guy”), who sees all that is going on around McCain, yet exonerates him personally, as if he is not responsible for the ugliness, lies and deceit of the McCain campaign.
What McCain’s reacting to, is something that other Republicans are reacting to, is the kind of ugliness of the criticisms [towards] Obama. I think McCain in his heart of heart wants to win this fair and square. He wants to win this because he’s the better candidate. He doesn’t want to win this because people think Obama is a Muslim or is a terrorist or he’s not really American. He wants to win this on his own merits. It upsets his sense of fair play — to win — to think that the support he’s getting is because of what he thinks are bad reasons. . .
Somewhere between Rolling Stone and Ana Marie Cox is the real John McCain. I hope that somewhere out there is a journalist willing to find him. As always, true journalists are in short supply, and down low in the food chain.
Piece of Mindful 