Article Contributed on: 7/30/2008 10:26:01 AM
The dying McCain campaign - increasingly tangled up in the candidate's own mistakes - is thrashing around trying to recover its footing, and is falling back on the first page in the old GOP playbook: bald-faced lies.
McCain's latest whopper is about Obama's successful world tour. During the German leg of the trip, Obama had planned a visit to wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. He would have been accompanied only by a military adviser working with his campaign, but canceled the visit at the request of the Pentagon.
The facts haven't stopped "Straight Talk" McCain and his mouthpieces from pushing the lie that Obama wanted to make the visit a photo opp, and called it off because he couldn't do that. "I have no idea [why the visit was canceled] except that I know that according to reports that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers..." said McCain, who either was lying or was hopelessly out of touch with "the facts on the ground," take your pick. McCain has launched an media campaign to spread the lie as far as possible.
That was too much even for reliable GOP shill Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, who was visibly distressed when she called McCain's claim "literally not true" (
YouTube video of the segment). Other national news organizations have called McCain on the lie, but his campaign is still out there flogging it as hard as possible. It's clearly a desperate attempt to take some of the shine off Obama's incredibly successful foreign tour, and possibly distract from McCain's seemingly endless chain of blunders.
His latest "senior moment" came Sunday television interview, when he called Gen. David Petraeus "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." Adm. Mike Mullen holds that title, while Petraeus holds a lower rank as Commanding General of the Multi-National Force - Iraq, a fact that a supposed national security expert should know.
UPDATE: The McCain campaign appears to be backing off its story, if only grudgingly. The campaign's official blog says today that Obama cancelled the visit "for reasons other than a lack of photo-op potential." The blog entry goes on to blame Obama and the media for the mistake. That's taking responsibility, GOP style.