Many progressive bloggers have seen how the media tends to give John McCain a get-out-of-jail-free card on issues for which they endlessly hammer Barack Obama. For example, Jeremiah Wright's rants were replayed endlessly but John Hagee's rants were greeted with near total silence until they got too numerous to ignore.
But Katie Couric and CBS may just have hit bottom.
On last night's CBS Evening News broadcast, Couric asked McCain about Obama's claim that the so-called "Anbar Awakening" did more to quell Iraqi violence than the Surge™ did. McCain answered that, "Colonel [Sean] McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."
Actually, it isn't. McCain has it exactly backwards. McFarland began talking with the Sunni shieks in September 2006. President Bush announced the Surge™ four months later, in January 2007.
For someone whose entire campaign seems to be based on the supposed success of the Surge™, it's a pretty big mistake and makes one wonder just how up to the job he really is.
This is, of course, not the first time he has gotten something so basic so wrong - witness his repeated confusion of Shia vs. Sunni and his Monday claim that there's a lot more work to do on the "Iraq-Pakistan border."
Iraq and Pakistan do not share a border.
More disturbing than McCain's constant demonstrations of ignorance, however, is how CBS edited their interview last night to protect the candidate. When Couric asked McCain the above question, he responded with a confused ramble which didn't sound good at all. So what did CBS do? They took a different answer and pasted it after Couric's question, thus making it look as if McCain was being far more coherent than he actually was.
This is bad. Editing interviews for time is one thing, but cutting and pasting to make a candidate look better is way out of line.
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