McCain: A Creature of the Media

And now... arising from the thin air of the deepest, darkest caverns of the Grand Canyon... it's Crazy John, the Creature from Cactus Country!!

by Ronald Kessler | Newsmax.com | February 3, 2008

John McCain is largely a creation of the media, David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, tells Newsmax.

“McCain has gotten a free ride from the media,” says Keene, who has endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “Indeed, he’s gotten better treatment than any GOP candidate I can remember.”

While tagging other candidates “flip-floppers,” Keene says “admiring reporters” ignore McCain’s flaws and the fact that he has “changed or obfuscated his position on more issues this cycle than any other candidate. And that’s saying something.”

A linchpin of the conservative movement, Keene has headed the ACU, the country’s oldest and largest conservative grass-roots lobbying group, since 1984. With one million members, the ACU runs the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) annual conference in Washington and publishes an annual Rating of Congress , the gold standard for ideological assessments of members of Congress.

Keene says McCain routinely rewrites his own record, and his version is accepted by the media.

“Take the Bush tax cuts,” Keene says. “When he opposed them, it was not because, as he now claims, they weren’t coupled with needed spending cuts, but because he charged à la the Dems that they were tax cuts for the rich.”

McCain said then: “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.”

“His rhetoric at the time had less to do with his claimed support for a smaller government than his apparent desire to out-demagogue Democrats in the Senate,” Keene says.

More recently, McCain “took the position that he shouldn’t be questioned about his past support of gun control legislation because the legislation he supported is now ‘moot,’” Keene says. “The press accepted this,” Keene says.

As second vice president of the National Rifle Association, Keene will automatically rise to president of the organization in three and a half years.

“Voters outside Washington must have wondered just what Senator Thad Cochran was getting at recently, when he said that the thought of John McCain in the White House ‘sends a cold chill down my spine,’” Keene says. “They must have wondered because...Keep reading>>>