Isn't it ironic (thanks for letting me borrow the line, Alanis) that on the very same day that the McCain campaign launches a new video decrying the media's coverage of Barack Obama; that CBS reveals once again just how in the tank the the press corps is for St. John McCain, King of Maverick. The sad part is, as Paul Krugman revealed during a panel discussion I attended at Netroots, most reporters (they don't deserve to be called journalists) and media organizations are notoriously thin-skinned. Therefore, McCain's calling them out on supposedly unfair coverage of the campaign may cut to the core. However, so far the media seems to be largely ridiculing this charge by McCain. This leads me to believe that I might be inhabiting some kind of alternate reality. Needless to say, however, the media's dedication to St. John, hero of humanity, is still alive and well; as seen in CBS' presentation of Katie Couric's interview with the King.
Despite any implicit or explicit media bias, McCain's comments are revealing on their own. They further demonstrate the King of Maverick's fundamental lack of understanding of even the most basic facts concerning the Iraqi occupation. As Spencer Ackerman points out in the post I linked to above, the Anbar Awakening (the cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders and their followers with the US military in the Anbar province west of Baghdad) came about before the surge. Therefore, for McCain to say that the surge allowed the Anbar Awakening to occur is just patently false. If you put this together with St. John's belief that Iraq and Pakistan border each other and his constant confusion of Sunni and Shia muslims, it becomes clear that the King of Maverick has absolutely no knowledge of Iraq. The only reason that McCain is perceived as a "serious" expert on national security and foreign policy is because he adores the use of military force. Unfortunately, the dominant media narrative celebrates and rewards those that believe military force is the first and only option availabe to US presidents.
Photo via Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
1 comment:
I would like to add an insightful, well-thought out comment to this post, but Noam Chomsky beat me to it, so I'll just let him speak for me (from Vincent Navarro's interview with Chomsky in today's ZNet): "McCain is another example of very effective propaganda-creation imagery. I mean, suppose there was a Russian pilot who was bombing civilian targets in Afghanistan and was shot down and tortured by the American-run Islamic fanatic terrorists there. Would we say he's a war hero? Would we say he's an expert in strategic and security issues, because he was a bomber of civilian targets? We wouldn't. But this is the image that's been created of McCain. His heroism and his expertise and strategy are based on the fact that he was bombing people from 30,000 feet and he was shot down. It's not nice that he was tortured, it shouldn't have happened, it was a crime, and so on. But that doesn't make him a war hero or a specialist in foreign policy. That's all a public relations creation."
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