There Was More Ammo

by Steve Soto

Many people wondered if the NYT had more ammunition stored away on the McCain-Iseman story than what they initially led with. It is clear that McCain’s forces thought the NYT and Washington Post stories would be focused on suggesting a sexual relationship between the squeaky-clean senator and the lobbyist. In reality, both papers really highlighted the concerns of his staff that he was vulnerable to charges that he was too close to a particular lobbyist, had done favors for her and her clients, and that this threatened to undermine his entire public persona since his Keating Five Rehab effort decades earlier.

After Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff rolled out the first counterpunch to the campaign’s “he did no favors” pushback effort, we now know that the NYT indeed had more ammo, making the entire McCain pushback effort One Big Lie. As the NYT and Marcy Wheeler so ably demonstrate, McCain went to bat for none other than Sinclair Broadcasting at the request of Iseman back in 1998, to help the right wing media giant evade FCC corporate ownership limitations. This would be the same Sinclair Broadcasting that smeared McCain’s alleged good friend John Kerry six years later during the 2004 campaign. In fact, it appears that McCain used his perch as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in the late 90’s to help right wing broadcasters and threaten the FCC, all while bamboozling the media since then that he is a champion of clean government and straight talk. And when those right wing broadcasters contradict you and undermine your claim of innocence, then it only makes it certain that there is more where this came from.

If McCain is revealed to be just another politician whose public persona of integrity is a well-crafted lie, it plays into the hands of the Obama campaign, and helps sell their narrative. Once you tear down the McCain persona, he is nothing more that John McBush, a third term for the worst eight-year period in our country's modern history.