John McCain’s campaign blogger counters a New York Times story by forcefully rebutting another story that doesn’t exist.
Likewise, Tony Blankley goes on the attack against the pro-Obama media by lamenting the lack of coverage for things that didn’t happen.
When the going narrative about your campaign and supporters is that you’ll lie at the drop of a hat, it helps if you don’t seek to disprove that by lying before anyone’s ever even thought of putting on a hat which they might in turn drop. You get the sense from the McCain campaign that they were waiting for the inevitable “invented the internet”/“voted for it before I voted against it” moment, and are flabbergasted at the media for not manufacturing it by now. The calculation was that they’d just keep browbeating the media until, eventually, Obama stumbled and it became the game-changer to end all game-changers.
Unfortunately, people still like to be teased with a glad hand of a crappy nickname or the faux-collegiality of getting invited to something, then getting shut out. Blatant lying and relentless aggression tends not to be the way that you convince people to do your dirty work, as years of cartoon henchmen turning on cartoon villains have taught us.
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I think there’s a good amount of surprise in the McCain camp over the way the press has reacted this year, because they expected—and rightfully so, given past performance—that the press would dutifully lick McCain’s scrotum at every possible opportunity, even when they were being chastised by the mighty MaverickReformerPOW! So when the press deigned to nip at the taint a little, they got upset. I’m not going to continue with the metaphor here; let’s just say it ends poorly and leave it at that.