Sometimes, it's simply remarkable just how worthless our media is when it comes to putting remarks into perspective, especially in the context of politics, particularly presidential politics. It's hard not to wonder whether they are professional stenographers who sometimes double as journalists.
One example that perfectly illustrates this failure are the recent attacks by John McCain (R) on Barack Obama (D) for harboring ambitions to be president, as McCain describes it.
Here's what McCain said during his remarks before the VFW yesterday:
“Behind all of these claims and positions by Senator Obama lies the ambition to be president."
What our media seems to either ignore or believes isn't relevant is McCain's own words in his own political memoir describing why he ran for president in 2000:
"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."
Of course, McCain's self-confessed "ambition to be president" isn't part of any media analysis when it comes to his own attacks against Obama on the same issue.
In fact, it's remarkable how few people even know that McCain wrote those words in his book "Worth the Fighting For." I had no idea until a month or two ago when a reader dropped them into a comment in a blog post. I was startled given how often McCain had been blasting Obama for suggesting he had (gasp) those same feelings.
Sadly, our press corps seems equally unaware, and blissfully so...
Mark Nickolas is the Managing Editor of Political Base, and this story was from his original post, "McCain: "It Had Become My Ambition To Be President""