Comments on the "liberal" media here?
In his February 28 appearance on CBS' Late Show with David Letterman, during which he announced his intention to run for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that "Americans are very frustrated" with the situation in Iraq and that "they have every right to be." McCain then added: "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure [in Iraq], which is American lives." The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all published March 1 articles reporting McCain's announcement on the Late Show, with The New York Times and the Post directly quoting McCain from the program -- but none of these articles noted his claim that "we've wasted" American lives in Iraq. Yet when Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made similar comments in Iowa on February 11, the Post and the Los Angeles Times reported the remarks the following day. The New York Times, meanwhile, devoted a February 13 article to Obama's subsequent apology and clarification.
McCain has since said he'd change the word "wasted" to "sacrificed", so let's see if there is a full article on it tomorrow in the NYT.
6 comments:
Smells like MediaMatters...oh, I see it was. I know that stench anywhere.
Anyway, big fucking deal.
Everyone understands what McCain and Obama meant unless they have a huge axe to grind.
I agree that everyone understands what they meant. My point is that the media only mentioned what Obama said, not what McCain said.
You have yet to suggest, let alone prove, that anything they've said is not true.
SET FRUSTRATION ON:
Because MM posts opinions on how the news is reported, oh blind one. Learn the fucking definition of F-A-C-T oh indoctrinated one.
Goddamn it Susan, if I was your MD I'd be scrounging around for antipsychotics.
And, AND, the media was all over McCain. But you, apparently, have this "bias cone" around your fucking eyes and can't see it.
Analysis from the Wall Street Journal (I'm terrible sorry it's not from an objective news site such as MediaMatters or Kos...gosh!)
Getting Wasted
John McCain said a stupid and offensive thing about Iraq the other night, as the Associated Press reports:
On Wednesday night, McCain said on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman": "Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be. We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."
McCain quickly apologized:
"I should have used the word, sacrificed, as I have in the past," the Arizona senator said after Democrats demanded he apologize as Sen. Barack Obama did when the White House hopeful recently made the same observation.
"No one appreciates and honors more than I do the selfless patriotism of American servicemen and women in the Iraq War," McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, said in a statement.
What's odd about this is that waste and sacrifice are opposites. To sacrifice is to give up something of value to oneself for the sake of something more valuable that transcends the self. To waste is to give up something of value for the sake of something of lesser or no value. A sacrifice is an unselfish act; a waste is an act of misdirected selfishness.
If a young man goes out, gets drunk, gets behind the wheel of his car, crashes and dies, it is fair to say he has wasted his life. That's quite different from a young man who loses his life in the course of doing dangerous work in the service of his country.
Liberal blogger Greg Sargent complains of a double standard:
A number of bloggers today have pointed out that the conservative outrage machine has been silent about this--even as it went into overdrive in response to Obama.
But here's another thing to look at. How many stand-alone stories by the big news orgs will we see about McCain's screw-up? How many times do you suppose mainstream media commentators will refer to McCain's fumble as a "mistake," a "gaffe," or any similar such term?
But there is a difference. Here is what Obama said:
We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.
Here is how he explained it:
What I meant to say was those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership that would give them a clear mission.
Obama's initial statement was crystal clear; his "explanation" was a cloud of smoke. Obviously he meant what he said in the first place. He also belongs to a party that has adopted a policy of near-total cynicism when it comes to matters of war, as evidenced by this comment from a colleague of his in today's New York Times:
"It's still George Bush's war," said Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, "but we run the risk of gaining some ownership of it if we don't make it absolutely clear that we are the party that wants to get out of there."
McCain's choice of words may reflect a reckless streak, and it certainly gives us pause at the thought of his becoming president. But here is the difference: McCain's statement tells us something worrying about his personal character; Obama's tells us something terrifying about his ideological character.
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