MEDIA WILL DEFEND McCAIN AGAINST FLIP FLOPPER CHARGES BECAUSE THEY WERE THE ULTIMATE VICTIMS & THEY LOOK LIKE IDIOTS FOR FALLING FOR HIS SIREN SONG

1932 feels like only yesterday around the McCain campaign

On the way to Dulles Airport yesterday, I stopped by a press conference Howard Dean had at the DNC. There was some analysis of polling data by a couple of Clinton and Obama pollsters. There were plenty of interesting bits but what caught my attention most strongly was the wide chasm between what the public feels about McCain-- basically, "who the hell is this guy who wants to embody a third Bush term?"-- and the attitude from the Washington-based Insider media which can be best summed up in a phrase the Ramones appropriated from Tod Browning's 1932 classic film Freaks:

Gabba, gabba,
We accept you, we accept you,
One of us, one of us.

I was astounded when an angry young lady in the audience started defending McCain's record. I asked someone if they always let McCain staffers into DNC press conferences. He said he thought she might be a journalist or an apprentice or something like that. It turned out to be GOP propagandist Jill Zuckman who writes for the Tribune and she took the opportunity to defend her hero and castigate Howard Dean in yesterday's "Swamp."

One glaring manifestation of the manufactured hero worship with which the press envelopes McCain that sharply contrasts with public perceptions, regards his status as a so-called "straight talking maverick." Co-opted hacks like MSNBC's Chris Matthews and David Broder of the Washington Post are incapable of seeing anything McCain says or does without the frame that McCain's slick p.r. machine-- of which they themselves are an integral component-- has developed for them in the last decade. The public, on the other hand, sees him as a typical "wishy washy," flip-flopping politician who will say anything to achieve his obsessive lust for power.

In yesterday's Time Michael Scherer brought up what is on everyone's mind-- or at least on everyone's who has an open mind: that McCain is, after all, a craven flip flopper. In their book, Free Ride, David Brock and Paul Waldman explore McCain's flip flops in greater depth, mega flip flops that have seen him go from denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" to prostrating himself before them and taking positions to the right of Bush to please them as he sought their-- and other divisive religionist extremists'-- support.

But that was only one of dozens and dozens of flip flops that an attentive media would normally use to help paint a well rounded picture of McCain instead of... well instead of the one on the right. One that I had forgotten all about was how he had flip flopped on the Confederate flag. In 2000 Bob Schieffer asked McCain about his views on the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state Capitol. He started out expressing what most Americans would say: "The Confederate flag is offensive in many, many ways, as we all know. It's a symbol of racism and slavery." But he didn't leave it there. Regardless of what Chris Matthews and David Broder and the DC press corps tells us, it isn't in John McCain's character to take strong and unpopular stands and stick with them-- and in South Carolina, where he needed votes desperately, this was assuredly not a popular stand. What happened next is instructive as to the real nature of John McCain, even if the media has glossed over it.

However, just days later, McCain gave the answer that many South Carolina conservatives wanted to hear: "Personally I see the flag as a symbol of heritage." McCain said that the decision over whether the flag should fly over the state's capitol should be left to South Carolina's voters, a position no different from George W. Bush's-- and one universally seen as a way of dodging the issue.

After the primaries, when the need to curry favor with conservatives had passed, McCain sang a different tune again [this one aimed at his real base: the DC media ass-lickers]. Angling himself back toward the center, he admitted that he had pandered and that his statements on leaving the issue of the flag up to the voters had been motivated by politics rather than principle, even calling it "an act of political cowardice."

His pals in the media were thrilled and showered him with accolades for this display of "political courage." They always do.

McCain, along with his BBF Joe Lieberman, was the Senate's biggest cheerleader for Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq. He never stopped talking it up and he was getting his talking points straight from Rove's little shoppe of horrors. He claimed Saddam was building nuclear weapons and that Americans were endangered from his weapons of mass destruction, blatant lies. In September, 2002 he was all about helping Bush and Cheney bamboozle the American public into supporting the war with statements about the dangers of Saddam-- not unlike Hitler's warnings to Germans in the late 30s about the dangers to Germany from Poland, and by running around telling anyone who would listen that he was certain "that the success will be fairly easy... We will win this conflict. We will win it easily."

Just one week before the invasion, [one of McCain's most consistent fluffers,] Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball "Do you believe that the people in Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?" McCain replied, Absolutely. Absolutely." Yet four years later when the war had become seemingly intractable, McCain rewrote his own history and that of the Congress. "When I voted to support the war, I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough," McCain said, "and those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of an easy task, then I'm sorry they were mistaken. Maybe they didn't know what they were voting for."

Yeah, maybe they were misled by Mr. Straight Talker and his media fluffers.

Back to Scherer and his question in Time if his hero, McCain, has-- once again-- been in full flip-flop mode on torture. Scherer starts off regurgitating all the hackneyed media tropes about McCain, particularly "straight talking maverick," and "unique moral authority" because of his own painful experience in the 1960s when he was tortured in Vietnam.

[T]here is nothing the Democrats would like to do more than portray McCain as a rank hypocrite, someone who has sidled up to George W. Bush and flip-flopped on torture, all for political gain-- which is exactly what Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean claimed in March. "It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to ban torture," Dean said in a statement. "And it is reprehensible that McCain changed his position on torture just to win an election."

Dean's statement, distributed in a press release, was a political attack meant to raise questions among independent voters. And as with most political attacks, it turned a grain of truth into a misleading landslide of overheated accusation. A review of the record shows that McCain has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue. But at a time when new details are emerging of the Administration's intimate involvement with formulating specific detainee interrogation practices, the Arizona Senator does now find himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with President Bush on a key election-year vote about those very same controversial policies.

Scherer pulls his head out of McCain's butt long enough to dismiss Dean's claims and reassure himself and his clique in the media that McCain is still their boy, pure and vestal and, at worst, a victim of the hated Bush.


AND NOW McCAIN APOLOGIZES FOR SOME OF HIS ATROCIOUS CIVIL RIGHTS RECORD-- BUT NOT ALL OF IT

Senator McWishy-Washy said he was sorry he voted against the Martin Luther King national holiday in 1983 but he says he's not apologizing for voting against a 1990 Civil Rights Act, a bipartisan bill that McCain helped successfully sustain a veto (by Bush I) on-- the first ever successful veto of Civil Rights legislation since 1866 when Congress overrode one that Andrew Johnson tried. Sam Stein has all the details at today's HuffPo.

The Biloxi SunHerald ran a McCain Myth Buster story today. "Time and time again, McCain was on the wrong side of key debates when it mattered most. In addition to his opposition to a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., McCain was the deciding vote against overriding President Bush's veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act-- the first defeat of a major civil rights bill in a quarter of a century. To make matters worse, just last weekend McCain defended the vote by equating it to "quotas," even though the bill had nothing to do with quotas."