Don't Look Now But Your Insanity Is Showing

Is there a full moon or something? It seems like the Left has chosen today to go especially crazy.

First, there's the whole cross in the sand story which hit critical mass sometime last night. The short version is that McCain has, on many occasions, told the story about how on Christmas Eve, one of his Vietnamese captors silently drew a cross on the ground as some kind of sign of Christian solidarity. The Left has decided that McCain made the story up to appeal to Christians. Or something. Tom Maguire at the link takes the Lefty theorizing apart.

For my part, this has got to be one of the dumber lines of attack, simply because there is no way at all that this story can be proved or disproved. There was nobody there except for McCain and the guard so there is no way to know what went on. That isn't going to stop the Left, which is desperate to take revenge for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry.

But this is not like Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia fib, where Kerry's actual location and movements were documented in detail. Rather, this is McCain's word versus...well, no one's word. This is McCain versus the insinuation that he's intentionally or as a result of his age misremembering his captivity. Worse, it's not like this is about an issue of even moderate importance. Who really cares what McCain's captors did? No one at all. In other words, it doesn't matter what McCain's story might have been. The Left would have found some way to call him a liar.

Second, the cone of silence SCANDAL. That is all caps because judging by the amount of attention this story has been given in the legacy media (in addition to Lefty blogs), this is a Really. Big. DEAL. ABC's Jake Tapper, for example, has stumbled onto a particularly unpersuasive line of attack. Y'see, even though the McCain campaign has said that McCain didn't get to hear the questions early, the campaign has tellingly (according to Tapper) been silent on whether McCain aides could hear the questions. McCain's denial apparently wasn't broad enough for Tapper to think that it includes being relayed the questions by way of his aides. Cue the gotcha motif.

I think Ace had this one right from the beginning. Someone in the McCain campaign was smart enough to anticipate questions about abortion and judges at a religious forum. By contrast, the Obama campaign is staffed with idiots. I think more than anything else, the Left and the legacy media are simply embarrassed for their guy. And that's why they are all grasping at straws.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 02:59 PM

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