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McCain gets Lewinsky’d
By Ned | February 21, 2008
Well, not exactly. But sort of. I mean, Jesus Christ.
WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
I wonder how long the New York Times has been sitting on this? I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to keep this in their back pocket until the Republican primary was basically over. Not because they endorsed McCain, but because those guys have shown a pretty remarkable aversion to printing news when that information could, you know, dramatically impact something.
This is already spreading across the blogosphere faster than herpes, and you can expect it to dominate headlines for a good while. That’s why the Lewinsky analogy makes so much sense - not because it’s another example of prominent American politicians gettin’ it on with people not they’re not married to, but because it’s another instance in which the PG-13 nature of the scandal is going to drown out the reason why it actually matters. See, I may wake up tomorrow morning to find myself in the minority of public opinion, but I really don’t give a damn who McCain (allegedly) deploys his surge into after hours. No, this is the reason why this should be news:
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
The article goes on to detail McCain’s involvement in the apparently long-forgotten Keating Five Scandal. That’s worth reading about as well. The point is that McCain’s not so hot at living up to his own standards of ethical conduct. Regardless of whether or not he’s in bed with lobbyists in a literal sense, he most certainly is in the metaphorical sense. That should be the story.
But what angle do you think the networks are going to want to go after? Boring old political corruption? Or a septuagenarian US Senator ravishing a lady who’s clearly not Mrs. Septuagenarian US Senator?
Yeah, I thought so.
Topics: Congress, Corruption, The Media |
February 21st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
[…] McCain gets Lewinsky’d […]
February 26th, 2008 at 12:26 am
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