Griper Blade: The Media Hearts McCain

I brought it up yesterday, but there's a McClatchy headline that reads "McCain picks failing Ohio factory to laud free trade." I return to this story to demonstrate a problem -- you don't see these sort of headlines about McCain very often, but he does stuff like this all the time. McCain has a real bad habit of doing things that not only should he have no business doing, but things that no sane person would even consider doing. What should be massive media and PR gaffes are ignored, for the most part, by the media.

On April 22, John McCain was in Selma, Alabama. There, McCain praised the civil rights movement.

"Forty-three years ago, an army of more than 500 marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an army that brought with them no weapons, which intended no destruction, that sought to conquer no people or land," McCain said standing a few hundred yards away from bridge, bathed in the warm spring sunlight.

"They were people who believed in America, in the promise of America," he said. "And they believed in a better America. They were patriots, the best kind of patriots."

On March 7, 1965, the protesters, almost all of them black, had gathered to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

They never made it across the bridge. At its crest, police and state troopers attacked them, unleashing a vicious assault on the demonstrators that was captured on film. When it was shown on television, it shocked the nation. March 7 would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Check out the photo to see how well that turned out. Selma's about 70% black, yet you're now snow-blind. Don't worry, it's like looking at a lightbulb, it'll go away eventually.

Of course, the problem is that McCain voted against the MLK jr. holiday -- in fact, he campaigned against it. This was something he had earlier apologized for at the very hotel where King was assassinated. On the anniversary of King's death. To a crowd who were less than enthusiastic. In fact, so unenthusiastic that McCain was booed. Yet, what would've been a media disaster for any other candidate was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media...

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