Category: Media

The Washington Times reports that John McCain and the GOP are battling over how much the Jeremiah Wright pertains to the race for the presidency;

Mr. McCain has grown increasingly infuriated by the North Carolina Republican Party’s decision to run a television ad next week in advance of the state’s May 6 primary calling Mr. Obama “too extreme” because of his connection to Mr. Wright. The ad includes a clip of one of Mr. Wright’s sermons in which he calls on God to condemn America.

Yesterday, after his campaign spent two days trying to persuade the state party’s chairman to cancel the ad, Mr. McCain’s anger boiled over.

“The Republican Party of the state of North Carolina is dead wrong,” he said on CBS’ “The Early Show.” “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure not only they stop it, but that kind of leadership is rejected.”

Although I agree that Wright’s extremist rants are a legitimate reason to vote against Obama, and I agree that Americans should know about this man that has influenced Obama’s poltics and views over the last 20 years, I also think that McCain is right. While we should all be discussing this horrid man and his potentially dangerous views, I don’t think it’s something a Presidential campaign should have as it’s focus.

Let Clinton and Obama roll around in the mud while the Republicans stay above that intramural fray. The media should be asking questions – that’s their job. But lately all the media do is print campaign fliers from the Democrats – especially Obama – as if that’s all we need to know.

McCain shouldn’t have to lower himself to level of the Democrats and the media should do their job – instead of manufacturing stories about McCain’s affairs and whether his birth in Panama should disqualify him as president.

Earlier today, I wrote about the Washington Post having only McCain’s temper to use against him. Well, the LA Times found a little nugget they thought would turn the people against McCain, too. Apparently, John McCain gets a pension because he retired from the military;

When McCain released his tax return for 2007 on Friday, he separately disclosed that he received a pension of $58,358 that was not listed as income on his return.

On Monday, McCain’s staff identified the retirement benefit as a “disability pension” and said that McCain “was retired as disabled because of his limited body movements due to injuries as a POW.”

McCain campaign strategist Mark Salter said Monday night that McCain was technically disabled. “Tortured for his country — that is how he acquired his disability,” Salter said.

Certain types of military and veterans pensions are either partially or completely tax-exempt, depending on the seriousness of the disability. In McCain’s case, the exemption is 100%.

Yeah, he got a disability retirement – that’s why it’s 100% tax free. Just like the disability insurance payment that anyone else could get if they had private disability insurance. But service members can’t legally purchase disability insurance, so we get our disability pension tax free.

So the LA Times went out to find someone to question McCain’s health;

McCain has twice developed melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer.

The fact that he is legally designated with a disability pension may raise further questions.

“It is a legitimate question to ask about the commander in chief: Is he fit to serve,” said Robert Schriebman, a senior Pentagon tax advisor and tax attorney who recently retired as a judge advocate for a unit of the California National Guard.

If McCain can hike across the Grand Canyon, then why should he be getting disability payments from the government that are tax-exempt, Schriebman asked.

Well, let me see if I can explain this so the class warriors can understand it;  if you’re a truckdriver with the good sense to buy disability insurance and you went blind and couldn’t drive your truck anymore, your disability insurance would pay you a tax exempt pension for the rest of your life, regardless of your ability to do something other than drive a truck. You could get a job working with a computer that pays more than you would have made driving a truck, and you’d still get your disability payment from the insurance company because you can’t do the job you had when bought the insurance.

Other people who retire from the military and get rated as disabled don’t get their whole pension tax exempt because of the varying degrees of their disability. I’ve got a disability rating of 10% which pays me a whopping $117/month that’s tax exempt – but that $117 is deducted from my Army pension and then paid to me by the VA, so essentially, I pay my own disability.

Now, John McCain couldn’t legally buy disability insurance when he was a military pilot, so the government makes up for that by giving him a suitable pension under the same circumstances every other American enjoys. Even though he can be a politician, he can’t be a military officer anymore.

I was just a sergeant first class who sold insurance for a few years and I understood the whole process well enough to explain it to you. I find it hard to understand why the LA Times couldn’t take the time to tell you the whole story, too.

The media has dug deeply into McCain’s background and they only thing they can dredge up is his temper. The Washington Post ran a front page opinion piece disguised as news Sunday titled “McCain; A Question of Temperament” that makes him out to be some kind of wild-eyed nutjob. And, of course they can find plenty of witnesses to support their contention that he’s too dangerous to be in the White House;

Since the beginning of McCain’s public life, the many witnesses to his temper have had strikingly different reactions to it. Some depict McCain, now the presumptive Republican nominee for president, as an erratic hothead incapable of staying cool in the face of what he views as either disloyalty to him or irrational opposition to his ideas.

[…]

Former senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, expresses worries about McCain: “His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.”

Of course that’s hyperbole writ large – only in the movies do people get so mad they blow up the world – but then they’re playing to the segment of our society that confuse movies with reality. Well, today, since the Sunday article didn’t generate much outcry, they tried it again. Michael Gerson writes in the Post “McCain’s Anger Management“. Gerson’s evidence of McCain’s temper?

His 1999 autobiography relates how, as an angry 2-year-old, he would hold his breath until he lost consciousness — the kind of family lore with the ring of truth.

Of course we all know how most 2-year-olds are rational beings not given to temper tantrums. John McCain seems to be the exception.

It seems to me that if John McCain was such an insane, irrational, ranting wildman, there’d be an arrest record, but sadly, for the media, there isn’t. However, I could probably dig up an arrest record on some Democrats who are truly insane. Congressman Jim Moran, who has been arrested for drunken brawling in his district, comes to mind, but the Post backs his candidacy every year as he runs for office across the Potomac in Virginia.

But John McCain held his breath until he passed out when he was two, so that’s much worse.