An embarrassment to our profession
April 1st, 2008, 11:01 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
Gene Robinson in the Washington Post, today: “At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century. That is indeed what McCain meant, by the way, no matter how his apologists try to spin it. Those who claim that by ‘a hundred years’ McCain was talking about a long-term peacetime deployment like the U.S. military presence in South Korea are being disingenuous or obtuse.”
Claim? Here’s McCain in January: “We’ve been in South Korea. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me.”
Yeah, why would anyone think he meant a deployment like South Korea, just because he said so?
I’m not a McCain supporter. I thin long-range plans for staying in a peaceful Iraq are planning for something that’s not going to happen. And I think the national press frequently goes easy on McCain, whose ability to massage and charm the media—and they’re willingness to be charmed—has been reported multiple times. Distorting something he said to make it sound worse, however, does not balance out reporters’ acknowledged willingness to cut McCain slack when he says something wrong or off-the-wall. And reporters who reinterpret a direct quote to explain what someone “meant” should be ashamed of themselves.
