Whiny McSame

-- by Sara

With only seven months left in the Longest Election Season Ever, it's not too early to start pointing out how entirely unsuitable for office John McCain is -- and how far the mainstream media will go to defend his tender ego and quick temper from the slightest bruising.

Crooks & Liars has today's story, which involves a McCain appearance earlier this week that devolved into a life-threatening free-fire situation on a par with....well, maybe Hillary's daring escape from a fusillade of eight-year-olds with poems:

At an appearance at an Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia during his Biography tour, a student calmly and rationally pointed out the rather obvious political overtones to the assembly (despite it not being portrayed as such to the student body, evidently) and asked what McCain's intent was being at her school.

STUDENT: We can see that this isn't completely absent, uh, political motivation isn't completely absent, yet we were told this isn't a political event. So, what exactly is your purpose in being here, not that I don't appreciate the opportunity, but I'd just like some clarification.

MCCAIN: I knew I should have cut this thing off. [laughter] This meeting is over. [laughter] Um, this is an opportunity and part of a series of visits that I'm playing…paying…we started in Mississippi, uh, where my family's roots are back to the middle of the 19th century, to here. We're going from here to Pensacola, Florida, to Jacksonville, Florida, and a couple of other places where…we're going to Annapolis, where I obviously attended the Naval Academy.

And it's sort of a tour where we try to not only emphasize the values and principles that guided me and I think a lot of this country in the past, but also portray a vision of how I think we need to address the challenges of the future, and a lot of that is in retrospect, but a lot of it is also advocacy and addressing certain challenges that face the nation. I hope that attendance here was not compulsory.

CNN reporter/McCain acolyte rushed to report on Our Hero's breathless escape from the threat of this Raging Student Heckler:

ACOSTA: So there you have it, John McCain, who is no stranger to incoming fire, able to handle that heckler there...

As Nicole Belle at C&L put it: "It is such an indictment on the pathetic notions of journalism from a journalist–especially when it comes to dealing with media darling John McCain–that CNN reporter Jim Acosta can't even recognize a legitimate question being asked of a presidential candidate and characterized it as being under fire from a heckler."

The story took me back to last July, and what 1500 bloggers put seven Democratic wannabe-candidates through at the debate held at Yearly Kos. We were polite (mostly) -- but those seven (Hillary and Obama, plus Edwards, Dodd, Kucinich, Richardson, and Gravel) spent an entire afternoon fielding questions that were several orders of magnitude more challenging than "Why are you here?"

If the mainstream media had any sense of proportion at all, McCain's apologists would have to liken what Obama and Hillary endured at our hands to...well, maybe surviving Hiroshima would qualify.

The funny thing is, though: all seven came through the grilling at the hands of Those Nasty Bloggers without a scratch. (In fact, several of them looked like they were having a pretty good time.) We can only conclude from this that every last one of those early Democrats would have made a tougher, better, less whiny-ass candidate than McKleenex.

If enduring the "threat" from a high school student with a softball question is what passes for "tough" in McCainland, he doesn't have the grit to be president of the local AARP chapter (those old gals can play rough), let alone the country.