Time Out?

"But what happened after that was even more unusual, and possibly without precedent: McCain's supporters simply suggested that the truth or falsity of their statements didn't matter. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign's factual claims: 'We're running a campaign to win. And we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.' Republican strategist John Feehery made the point even more bluntly, telling The Washington Post: 'The more The New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there, and the bigger truths are: She's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent.' Then, he added, 'As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter.'

"Here we have the distilled essence of the McCain campaign's ethos: Perception is reality. Facts don't matter."

Remember earlier this week when the McCain campaign ripped the New York Times as in the tank for Obama for reporting that Fannie Mae and Fredie Mac had paid the firm of campaign manager Rick Davis nearly $2 million? The campaign didn't challenge the facts, and then there was this followup on payments from Freddie Mac:

"One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain's campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement." Davis says he's taken no equity from the firm based on new profits from the firm for 18 months.

And that's about it, as John Nichols observes in the Nation:

"Like his vice-presidential candidate, Davis is suddenly unavailable to the press.

"Davis had been scheduled to lunch Wednesday with reporters and editors at a high-brow Washington event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. It would have been a perfect place to clear the air, if Davis chose to do so. Instead, the embattled campaign manager announced hours before the event that he would send an underling. Davis, it was announced, would be 'heading out on the trail.'

"Perhaps he and Sarah Palin can hide from the press together."

Finally, Andrew Sullivan has taken issue with yesterday's column, in which I reported on questions he had raised about whether Sarah Palin is really the mother of 5-month-old Trig and quoted from e-mails he had sent Michael Goldfarb and other McCain aides on the subject:

"Kurtz published my confidential emails to Goldfarb, having been contacted by Goldfarb to write the story.

"I should reiterate two critical things: I have never claimed that Trig Palin is not Sarah Palin's biological son. In fact, I have gone to enormous lengths never to say that, going silent for two days to figure it out and decided to leave it alone. Why? Because I had no proof of anything, only questions . . .

"Like everyone else, I have been trying to get some answers to some factual questions from the McCain campaign but they refuse to provide them. But for the McCain campaign to go to these lengths, violating core confidentiality of private good-faith questions, is something that has never happened to me before in journalism. I am also amazed that a fellow journalist would publish such emails in full. But since this is now all in the open, you deserve to know what your blogger has been trying to do in private for three weeks: just get a factual answer to a factual question on the record.

"They won't. They cannot take the time to confirm on the record that Trig is Sarah's biological son, but they will try to smear the person asking. What does that tell you?"

I do think Sullivan, like any journalist, is entitled to ask any question he wants. The campaign can choose whether to comment or not. So I asked Goldfarb yesterday for an unambiguous, on-the-record statement about Palin and the baby. Here is what he said, referencing the fact that Palin says she deliberately dressed to hide her pregnancy for months:

"These rumors are false. It is her baby. The whole thing is absurd. All of this rests on the fact that she wore her pregnancy extremely well. A couple of months later, there are a ton of pictures showing she is obviously pregnant. It's ridiculous. There's just nothing to it. We're not going to release her gynecological records to prove it. It's just madness."