Wallowing in the funk

Wow. It's gotten even worse than I expected. Apparently the Obama campaign has had to "reject" Clark's comments from Face the Nation yesterday. Unbelieveable. Watch this clip and tell me there's really something wrong with what Clark said:



It's just not in Schieffer's DNA, or the DNA of the media in general, to accept any discussion of John McCain in any way less than sainthood. Just outrageous. Schieffer could put up a good challenge to Lanny Davis' performance on behalf of Hillary Clinton, he is so detached from reality. But the entire media lives in that same detached world.

As usual, Josh Marshall is all over this from the start, from the ridiculous buy in of the beltway media to the charge that Clark and, implicitly, Obama, have questioned McCain's military record, to the Obama campaign's disowning of Clark's comments. Oy.

And so the media has once again done the Republicans' work for them. By ignoring the actual context of what Wes Clark has said -- that McCain's experience in the military is not relevant to his capacity to serve as President -- and instead portraying it as an attack on McCain's service and courage, they have shifted the focus away from an honest discussion of who would make the best president into a discussion of personal attacks. The McCain campaign continues to make a centerpiece of the campaign the fact that McCain served in Vietnam and was a POW. For the media to make the topic of the relevance of that experience off limits is nothing less than absurd.

This whole dustup is a distraction. At worst, it was a careless use of words on the part of General Clark. But not because he is wrong -- he's not, and it would be a mistake for him to capitulate on that. But, as a true strategic planner, General Clark needs to find a way to move forward, to continue to make the point that has been obfuscated by clumsily falling into Schieffer's rhetorical trap, that acknowledges that courage and sacrifice are valuable qualities (which qualities in John McCain General Clark actually spent much more time praising in his Face the Nation interview than the co-called controversial attack on McCain), but that there are other ways to show courage and sacrifice other than through military service -- many of which are evidenced by Barack Obama's life story -- and that there are other equally (actually, much more) important qualifications for the office, including good judgment and inspiration and sound policy (including a sound policy of extricating America from a disasterous and ill-conceived intervention that does not serve America's long term security interests and which John McCain would extend indefinitely), all of which lead him to support Barack Obama.

Update: Brandon Friedman and VoteVets.org respond to this "controversy."

Update #2: Where's the discussion of Bob Schieffer's disgraceful performance as an interviewier?