Launching a new image

Today, twenty-four hours before the voting, the McCain campaign launches a new image for John as the affable happy warrior. It's too late. We already know that he becomes erratic under pressure.

Of course, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, happily types up the tripe without witnessing any of it. She had multiple sources, all inside the campaign's inner circle. So that has to be objective.

Why is it that the Times doesn't simply reserve a news hole for the McCain press release?

Reporters notice

What's this? The truth? Where did that come from?

CNN has a couple of people who don't simply plug in to the McCain campaign spin. Rebecca Sinderbrand is one of them, and she shows how McCain's non-suspension suspension is obvious bullshit.

It's amazing how beneficial it is to actually keep your eyes open. Hell, even Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller manage, after a fashion, to notice that McCain is posturing, even if they have to throw in a couple of darts at Obama in the name of false equivalence.

Elisabethan manners

Perhaps the most valuable print real estate in the world, and the New York Times fritters it away on the trivialities that Elisabeth Bumiller sees in the sexual politics of how John McCain hugs Sarah Palin (as if we can't see that for ourselves). Even p. A21 of tomorrow's paper, where this is promised to run in the dead tree edition, would be better used by blank gray emptiness.

Remember, an editorial committee permitted this. It's not as though Bumiller herself gets to allocate pages.