Straight Talk Goes Out The Window

Andrea Mitchell started to vindicate herself yesterday when taking on the GOP surrogates for McThuselah and stating the obvious - that McCain's new ad criticizing Obama for not visiting the troops because he couldn't bring cameras, or that he couldn't find time to visit them but found time to go to the gym is "literally not true", a kinder way of saying that the Maverick is a fucking liar.

I ripped Mitchell in the past for dumb remarks she's made towards Barack Obama, so I must give her kudos for acting like a journalist in this case. I suppose that even she can't let some of the McCain gaffes and specious lies go without calling them out for what they are - a betrayal of "straight talk" and "respectful campaigning," my friends.



Later in the day, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow took a look at McCain's record of how he supposedly supports the troops.



Hopefully as we get closer to the election, the reporting of John McCain will stray away from the St. Barbecue style that it has been to this point and will concentrate more on the gaffes, hypocrisy and inanity of some of his statements.

(H/T Jason Linkins, HuffPo)

UPDATE (7/30/08 10:45pm): More Andrea Mitchell -

MITCHELL: Did he make a bad call deciding not to go to Ramstein? He had every right to go to Ramstein, to visit the troops in Landstuhl. He had already been to visit the troops in Iraq. Without cameras, without an entourage. And he got-his people, rather-got so backed off by warnings from the Pentagon. Now please be careful, don’t bring your military aide, because he’s now a political aide. The Pentagon was way too aggressive probably in that. And they got so nervous: oh this is going to look political. And they were damned if they did or damned if they didn’t. Let me just finish what I was saying…just this one point…there was never any intention-let me be absolutely clear about this-the entourage was never going to go. There was never an intention to make this political. But by tacking it on to the tail end of a political-the political leg of the trip, they opened themselves up they feared to the criticism, and if they’d gone, they’d be criticized and not going, they were criticized and the McCain commercial on this subject is completely wrong! Factually wrong.