Less Than Candid

Arianna Huffington complains that the press is "paying scant attention to the fact that the presumptive Republican nominee for president apparently doesn't have a clue about what's going on in the Middle East.

"And with the U.S. death toll hitting 4,000 (with 25 American soldiers killed over the last two weeks, the deadliest fortnight for our troops since September 2007) . . . John McCain's tenuous grasp on what is happening in the region becomes all the more worthy of attention.

"For those who were too busy watching Rev. Jeremiah Wright damn America for the 10,000th time to hear about McCain, let's review: at a stop in Jordan last week, McCain made the ludicrous claim that Al Qaeda insurgents were being trained in Syria. Asked again about it, he dug in deeper, claiming it was 'common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known.' . . .

"Every time McCain packs a suitcase, the press automatically anoints him as 'presidential.' They dutifully did it on this latest trip, even though it came just under a year after McCain's clownish stroll through a Baghdad market, which he declared proof that one could 'walk freely' around Baghdad -- while being guarded by three Blackhawk helicopters, two Apache gunships, and 100 armed soldiers."

That was not his finest hour.

As for the HRC damage control, "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried Tuesday to put a softening spin on her misstatement that she ran from sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia as first lady, saying the comment was a mistake that 'proves I'm human.'

"Yet Mrs. Clinton quickly found herself explaining a new comment, that it was the first time in 12 years she had told the story wrong," says the NYT.

After criticism from Barack's side, Mrs. Clinton's campaign responded with an e-mail catalog of Mr. Obama's 'exaggerations and misstatements.' The campaign cited his saying that he was a law professor -- he was a senior lecturer -- and that his parents fell in love because of the historic 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Ala., even though he was born in 1961. He later said he was referring broadly to the civil rights movement."

At Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan says Hillary will be seriously wounded:

"Voters won't react kindly to the revelation that Clinton tried to take them for a ride about the circumstances of her trip to Bosnia, and saying she 'misspoke' ain't gonna do the trick.

"It may not hurt as much as Rev. Wright hurt Obama, but this hurts Clinton. She already faces questions with the public about her honesty and trustworthiness, and this episode taps directly into a vein of the most unpleasant aspects of her political life. On a more direct level, it undermines her claim of superior experience, an argument that appears to have been paying dividends against Obama over the last few weeks.

"Clinton had put herself out there as the person who could answer that 3am call because of her experience as first lady and because she claimed to have been in the kind of tough and dangerous situations that had steeled her for the 'red phone moment.'