The Gaffe Patrol

Mitchell Bard at the HuffPost:

"I am so sick of hearing about how the media are biased toward Barack Obama. It's bad enough that John McCain's campaign is making this completely bogus claim, but now the mainstream media are reporting it as if the slant towards Obama is a given . . .

"Nobody in the history of modern politics has been a bigger media sweetheart than John McCain. And in this campaign, he is allowed to virtually say or do anything without being called on it . . .

"I am not arguing that McCain's geographical aphasia is quid pro quo proof of his foreign policy incompetence. But I am arguing that McCain never gets called on his errors by the mainstream media (Diane Sawyer was silent after his Iraq-Pakistan statement on Good Morning America), where Obama would absolutely be taken to task (and probably called inexperienced) if he made the same errors."

Mother Jones's David Corn chimes in:

"Can you imagine if Barack Obama made a similar verbal slip? The McCain camp would declare it proof he is unfit to command. And media commentators would howl. (Have you noticed that much of the media coverage of Obama's overseas trip is framed this way: the trip is fraught with risk . . . for if he makes any mistake overseas, he's done for?)

"Yet with McCain, this is just another . . . eh, McCain moment . . . How many passes does McCain get? I don't know."

Barely a day goes by without McCain talking about how he pushed for the surge and Obama opposed it, which is absolutely true. But he went a step further yesterday in New Hampshire:

"This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

That set off Joe Klein: "This is the ninth presidential campaign I've covered. I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad."

The NYT picks up the story:

"Mr. McCain's advisers, who are seething about the extensive news coverage of Mr. Obama's trip, went further in a conference call on Tuesday when Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's chief foreign policy aide, sarcastically asked if Mr. Obama's foreign policy credentials were based on his attendance at a junior high school in Indonesia or a trip he took to Pakistan during spring break in college. Mr. Scheunemann added that Mr. Obama 'seems to forget that we have elections in this country, not coronations.'