John Mccain Media Darling

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, John McCain admitted to me that he hadn't voted for George Bush.

With all this focus pocus on the excesses of one Democratic candidate's former Baptist preacher, John McCain is getting away with not not talking about any of the issues.

This week, I had the opportunity to chat with a friend, author and blogger Cliff Schecter, about his new book, The Real McCain.

It only makes sense that the media have focused non-stop on the looming threat of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago while paying scant attention to the fact that the presumptive Republican nominee for president apparently doesn't have a clue about what's going on in the Middle East. And with the U.S. death toll hitting 4,000, John McCain's tenuous grasp on what is happening in the region becomes all the more worthy of attention. READ MORE John McCain, Iraq, and the Eyewitness Fallacy: John McCain's glowing post-visit assessment of conditions in Iraq, and Hillary Clinton's hyperbolically harrowing recollections of her 1996 trip to Bosnia both stand as shining examples of what the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge dubbed "the eyewitness fallacy." In a brilliant essay, Muggeridge described public figures of strong conviction throughout history -- many of them greatly admired and well-meaning -- who, in eyewitness accounts, saw what they wanted to see, and became what they wanted to be. READ MORE