Poking The Monkey

By Ron Beasley

At a place I used to work we had a fellow worker who had a short fuse.  It could be amusing when he went ballistic so there were some who tried to set him off for the entertainment value.  We refereed to this as poking the monkey.  There were times when this resulted in unpleasant consequences. 

The McCain campaign looked at some polls and realized the media was not held in very high regard so when they lied if they simply attacked the media for reporting the lies they would gain an advantage.  What they failed to take into consideration was that it's that media that determines what most people see and hear.  They may be finding out that they poked the wrong monkey.

From the right leaning Politico:

McCain camp criticism rife with errors

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

The McCain campaign specifically attacked the New York Times because:

On Monday, the paper published an article on page A18 tying a McCain campaign manager, Rick Davis, to lobbying group set up by troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Yes, they have poked the wrong monkey.  We have seen McCain spokes people called on all the networks - unheard of in recent history.  Everything they say is questioned, not a good thing when most of what you say is a lie.  Say it often enough and people will believe it has worked well for the Republicans but it only works when the media plays ball.

Comments

[zak822]

"Say it often enough and people will believe it has worked well for the Republicans but it only works when the media plays ball."

So very true, and it points to another great story. Why did the McCain loving media stop playing ball? GOP lies are hardly a new thing.