It will come as a great shock to you that liberal blogs are spotlighting a tale from a book by “Netroots author Cliff Schecter” that cites “reporters from Arizona on condition of anonymity” who claim McCain said something quite nasty to his wife on the campaign trail back in 1992. You can find the exact language at the link, but basically it’s mocking her appearance and using a vulgar term for a woman that will usually get a speaker slapped.
Because, you know, Arizona reporters would never report that at the time. A sitting senator up for reelection using that kind of language to his wife’s face, in front of reporters, just wouldn’t be newsworthy. Those reporters would hold onto that story, and keep it secret, as McCain became a prominent national figure in the 1990s, throughout the 2000 race, throughout McCain’s campaign of the last year and a half, just so they could reveal it now to “Netroots author Cliff Schecter” — because his book is the right venue to reveal this shocking outburst. Obviously, it’s extremely plausible that these three reporters would tell Schecter this instead of reporting on the outburst themselves, because journalists are well known for casually giving away shocking scoops to other reporters. It happens all the time. Yes, this field is one big happy scoop-sharing cooperative.
Schecter tells another liberal site that the Arizona papers didn’t report on it because “uneasiness about how to get such a coarse exchange into a family newspaper.”
Right. Asterisks and dashes weren’t invented until the late 1990s, so there was no way newspapers could give readers a sense of what McCain said without spelling out the actual comment. And only recent breakthroughs in technology have permitted this technique called “paraphrasing” that gives readers a sense of what was said without actually spelling out bad words.
I know I should be outraged by this, but it’s just more or less par for the course over on that side of the aisle. It will be interesting to see if any MSM outlet pays any attention to this light-years-from-verified mud.