The Times Upholds Its Standards

The New York Times smears John McCain in tomorrow’s paper, accusing him of ethics violations and insinuating that he had an affair with a lobbyist. What is most striking, though, if you actually read the story, is how thin it is. It’s mostly about the Keating Five scandal, which dates to the late 1980s. The “news” that gives the story a hook has to do with McCain’s friendship with a pretty blonde lobbyist that apparently ended in 2000. As for the purported affair, the Times offers zero evidence. This line sums up, I think, the absurdity of the paper’s attempt to cobble together an anti-McCain story out of these widely-separated elements:

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain

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