New York Times McCain Story Not About Sex - It's About Illegal and Inappropriate Actions of a US Senator on Behalf of a Lobbyist

Readers of a 3,000 word New York Times story on Thursday might have been surprised to read that John McCain, the likely nominee of the formerly-grand old party was a bit of a schmuck. But there was a lot more to the story that the rest of the media could have fleshed out if they did their homework.

The Times story indicated some possible hanky-panky with a female lobbyist, but if you only read the MSM (mainsteam media), without reading the actual Times story, it's about the sex, not the corruption.

But the truth appears to be that McCain went over and above the rules at the request of the attractive lobbyist representing Paxton Communications. Paxton wanted a favorable ruling from the FCC on the purchase of a broadcasting station and McCain wrote letters to the FCC in Paxton's favor. But the letters were unusual, inappropriate, ill-timed and illegal.

As always, Amy Goodman's daily alternative media program, Democracy Now, did a much better job of filling in the details and revealed that the letters sent by McCain violated FCC rules -- they were illegal intrusion by the man who held fiscal sway over the FCC. Here is what a person on the other side of the battle had to say on the Amy Goodman show Friday morning about the letters:

"So the FCC rules explicitly prohibit communications that go to the merits or communications that go to urging the FCC to act by a specific date. So this was a clear violation of the FCC’s rules. And on December 20th, we actually filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission’s general counsel, alleging that he (McCain) had violated the rules, and we asked for them to act on it right away. They did not. However, eventually, in August of 2000, they did rule that the senator had violated the rules."

The NYT itself seemed to take a bit softer stance, letting the readers judge the facts as they had them thus far. In the opinion of the NYT's Public Editor, the person charged with responding to reader complaints and the paper's practices, the McCain story had more to do with a national official who was careless in how he conducted the public's business and he had this to say about what the Times editor told him:

BILL KELLER, the executive editor of The Times, said the article about John McCain that appeared in Thursday’s paper was about a man nearly felled by scandal who rebuilt himself as a fighter against corruption but is still “careless about appearances, careless about his reputation, and that’s a pretty important thing to know about somebody who wants to be president of the United States.”

If you are a Republican and you cheat on your wife, it's apparently OK as long as long as you marry that person and make her your next wife, just like Rudy Guilliani.

And just because McCain only got his hands slapped as a member of the Keating Five in the 1989 savings and loan scandal, doesn't mean he is the squeaky clean guy he likes to see himself as.

John McCain is now declining to comment any further on the matter and ironically even Rush Limbaugh is defending McCain now. If the Times had the story it must be wrong, the right wing wackos seem to feel. A week earlier McCain was too liberal.

I just can't wait to see if the MSM is really going to do its job or whether the rest of the story will come from the alternative media.

There is a lot more there there.