Joe Klein Latest to Be Ejected from McCain Plane
Just three weeks after booting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd from the campaign plane, Team McCain grounded Time magazine's Joe Klein as well. Apparently, when the going gets tough, John McCain tells the tough to get going.
Unable to withstand Klein's documentation of the McCain campaign's descent into the gutter, the Straight Talk Express banished him instead:
Campaign spokesperson Michael Goldfarb responded that "we don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either."
Once upon time, Joe Klein lauded John McCain the mythical maverick. In a July 2007 column titled, "McCain is Back," Klein praised the "funny, free-range McCain reincarnated" on the campaign trail. "It is wonderful to have McCain," he said, "back roiling the waters."
Alas, that was then and this is now. As McCain's dark and dirty campaign has spiraled downwards, Klein in recent weeks blasted McCain's slanderous ads, his ridiculous "socialist" smear of Obama and his branding Obama as, in essence, a traitor. One year after welcoming back the old McCain, Klein expressed disgust at the new one:
"I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad."
Days later, Klein lamented:
"A few months ago, I wrote that John McCain was an honorable man and he would run an honorable campaign. I was wrong."
Maureen Dowd learned that same lesson in September. After years of covering McCain, Dowd was just one casualty in the McCain campaign's war on the New York Times.
Ironically, Dowd's most revealing work about the sinister side of John McCain came a decade earlier. As it turns out, it was her 1998 interview of McCain in the wake of his infamous Chelsea Clinton joke which provided a disturbing window into his soul.
As David Corn reported in Salon, John McCain back in 1998 used the occasion of a Republican Senate fundraiser to slander President Clinton's daughter and attorney general. Following in the proud tradition of Rush Limbaugh (who in 1993 called the young Chelsea "a dog"), Mr.Straight Talk joked:
"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."
As Dowd rightly predicted at the time, Senator McCain's vulgar slur produced no backlash, as he "so revered by the press that his disgusting jape was largely nudged under the rug."
But McCain's response to Dowd provides a telling glimpse into the character of the man who would succeed George W. Bush as the next Republican president. In their phone interview, McCain brushed off his grotesque insult as the equivalent of a rambunctious teenager egging a neighbor's house:
''This is the bad boy,'' he said in a phone interview. ''It was stupid and cruel and insensitive. I've apologized. I can't take it back. I could give you a whole bunch of excuses, but there are no excuses. I was wrong, but do you want me crucified? How many days does it need to be a story?''
He said the Senator who spoke just before he did to the Republican fat cats made a tasteless joke about Viagra. ''So I got up and said, 'You think that was a tasteless joke? Listen to this one.' The minute it came out of my mouth, I thought, 'Oh no, this is a terrible mistake.'''
But, he added, defensively, ''I will always maintain a sense of humor. Life is too short not to.''
Apparently, John McCain has long since lost his sense of humor. As for Klein, he maintained his sense of perspective about Team McCain's cowardly reaction to his opinions:
"I understand that and don't mind it, as long as we keep things civil. McCain hasn't kept things civil this year, and he has taken dangerous and foolish positions on a great many issues, which is why I've been on his case. And will stay on his case, flying commercial."
Critics of John McCain, it turns out, are not free to move about the cabin.
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