New York Times Report on John McCain Is Pre-9/11 Journalism

There is no love lost between John McCain and conservatives. But as much as we hate McCain, we hate the New York Times even more and the newspaper's hit job on McCain, accusing him of having a "close" relationship with an attractive young telecommunications lobbyist and doing favors for her, is causing conservatives to circle the wagons and rally around McCain. Even Rush Limbaugh, who hates John McCain, has blasted the New York Times. We are outraged that a purportedly respectable newspaper would print such sleaze after delaying the story for several months, until John McCain secured the nomination and the New Republic, which we also hate, threatened to scoop the paper. We are tired of this kind of dirty politics. When revelations about Gary Hart's affair with Donna Rice torpedoed his campaign and Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, it was a different time. And if these allegations about McCain had come out eight years ago when they took place, they might have derailed his campaign, too. But that was before September 11; 9/11 changed everything.

Before 9/11 McCain would have been the first to admit that it is wrong for a President or a Presidential candidate to commit adultery. After all, he voted to impeach President Clinton. McCain has denied having a romantic relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but even if the allegations are true, it isn't any of our business. We have more important things to worry about now than politicians' sex lives. I'm sure some liberals will think it's hypocritical to say that a sex scandal is no big deal now that it is a Republican who is being accused, but that is just another example of pre-9/11 thinking. Back in the 1990s impeaching Clinton was the right thing to do but now the rules have changed. 9/11 changed everything.

Before 9/11 it was the duty of the news media to pry into the sex lives of Presidential candidates. News organizations had to check into every allegation of sexual misconduct because that was their job. The public had a right to know every detail of what went on between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky no matter how tawdry. It was important back then to know about Bill Clinton's private life and worth spending millions of dollars to prosecute him. And the news media had no choice but to report on it. But now that we are at war in Iraq and engaged in a global war on terror, the news media should not be digging around in the dirt like a tabloid newspaper, wasting precious resources reporting on some trivial sex scandal. It just makes them look sleazy. 9/11 changed everything.

Before 9/11 McCain felt really bad about doing favors for campaign contributors. When it was pointed out back in 2000 that he had sent a letter to the FCC on behalf of a campaign contributor Paxson Communications, whose lobbyist was Vicki Iseman, he expressed sadness that our campaign finance system gave people the impression that politicians were bought and sold and that campaign contributions were a legalized form of bribery. "We're all tainted," McCain said. "We're all under suspicion as long as Washington is awash in special interest money." In 2002 he co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act to help dispel this false impression. What McCain didn't realize at the time was that this law put a wedge between politicians and companies' whose help might be needed not just to pay for expensive campaigns but also to aid in the War on Terror. For example, the government needed the help of telecommunications companies to spy on potential terrorists. In return McCain and other members of Congress are trying to get them immunity from being sued by angry customers who selfishly don't want to give up their privacy to fight terrorism and telecommunications companies are giving these politicians even more campaign donations. It's a system where everyone is happy as McCain eventually realized. McCain didn't understand how important it is to keep these lines of communication between big business and politicians open while we are fighting the War on Terror. He didn't understand that 9/11 changed everything.

One of the things that has worried conservatives about John McCain is that on many issues he seems to have had a pre-9/11 mindset, not just on campaign finance reform. But in the course of the campaign he has modified some his stances so that they are more in accord with the post-9/11 world. That doesn't mean that we are ready to trust him yet, but at least he seems to be moving in the right direction. He has opposed waterboarding and torture because he hasn't been able to get over being tortured himself in Vietnam. But since he has been running for President, he seems to have softened his stance a little, supporting a compromise that allowed the Bush Administration to torture a few people when it is really, really necessary to fight the War on Terror. Many conservatives will never forgive him for sponsoring legislation to reform immigration, which would grant amnesty to thousands of illegal immigrants and leave our borders undefended. But now he is beginning to realize that we need to secure our borders to stop terrorists disguised as Mexican workers from streaming over and he doesn't seem so eager to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who are already here, who could potentially be members of terrorist sleeper cells. He seems to realize that once someone has broken our immigration laws, they may feel that they can break other laws, too, like laws against terrorism. McCain also angered conservatives when he joined the Group of 14, which stopped the appointment of conservative judges who would not allow terrorists to be released because of technicalities like habeas corpus and rules against secret evidence and forced confessions. As a Presidential candidate he has promised to appoint these kinds of conservative judges who realize that the War on Terror cannot be hampered by abstract constitutional principles. Though he still has a long way to go, little by little, McCain seems to be more flexible with his principles, coming to terms with the fact that 9/11 changed everything.

Conservatives don't want to return to the days when politics were dominated by the dirty tricks of the Clintons, which is why we are relieved that Hillary appears to be going down to defeat and that Democrats are going to give Barack Obama the nomination. We want to discuss issues not engage in tit-for-tat scandal mongering. Many conservatives, with the exception of a few of the less reputable blogs, resisted spreading the allegation made by Larry Sinclair in a YouTube video and reported in the World Net Daily that Barack Obama did drugs and had gay sex with him even though Sinclair does not look crazy at all. Although some people might think that if Obama was going to have gay sex with someone, he would do it with someone a little more attractive and less emotionally unstable, Sinclair's allegations do contain some credible details, for example, the fact that Sinclair, who is white, says that he snorted powder cocaine, while Obama, who is, of course, black, smoked crack before they had sex. Everyone knows that statistics show black people are more likely to smoke crack so that would make sense. While most conservatives did not want to have to report on these allegations, the New York Times story has forced our hand. John Hawkins of the Right Wing News did link to the story "because not only does the Left side of the blogosphere have zero qualms about promoting this kind of story when it involves Republicans, the mainstream media has absolutely no qualms about it either," he says. The fact that the New York Times is willing to print innuendo about McCain but not take this story about Obama seriously, he says, just proves that there is a double standard.

But we conservatives don't want to wallow in sleaze. We really want to get back to discussing the issues, like the fact that Obama is a Communist "to the left of Mao" because everyone knows that in the 1960s only Communists married outside their race as Obama's parents did. "For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics," wrote Dan Quayle's former speechwriter Lisa Schiffren in The Corner this week. (Of course, some white men, like Strom Thurmond had children with black women out of wedlock, but they certainly weren't Communists and they didn't marry the women.) Why isn't the New York Times writing about this? If the New York Times didn't have a political axe to grind, it would investigate whether the marriage of Obama's parents was part of a Communist plot to encourage miscegenation and undermine the security of this country, instead of dirtying this campaign with sleazy innuendo about John McCain's private life. Haven't we moved beyond this kind of politics? Didn't 9/11 change everything?

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