It's increasingly clear that John McCain intends to use his special relationship with the press to run a campaign based on relentlessly lying about his opponent:
At a press conference here, I just asked John McCain about why he keeps talking about Obama's alleged willingness to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has no power over Iranian foreign policy, rather than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who does. He said that Ahmadinejad is the guy who represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations, which is a fair point. When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the "average American" thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn't get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, "But isn't it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?" Oh well.
But of course it's not. McCain and McCain's allies in the world of neoconservative punditry have deliberately created the entirely false notion that Ahmadenijad runs Iranian foreign policy. One point I've been making in my book-related appearances is that it's not a coincidence that the preventive war crowd told a lot of whoppers about Iraq before the war and is telling a lot of whoppers about Iran now -- the right knows that contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom, there's just no evidence that the American people are deep down yearning for senseless violence and imperial adventurism.
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Heads in the Sand
I'll take the optimistic view for the moment, at least Joe Klein, who is temperamentally the type of journalist to like McCain, saw through this and has been seeing through it. But, in part, that is because Klein takes foreign policy seriously--and knows something about it. For other journalists, I fear, who only know "campaigns" they will keep eating McCain's shit.
Posted by David | May 20, 2008 12:30 PM