Say Anything Blog

Having already alleged an extra-marital affair thinly sourced to anonymous ex-McCain staffers and questioned the status of his citizenship, the New York Times thought it would be fun to go after McCain’s melanoma surgery from eight years ago.  The point being to paint the admittedly aged candidate as frail and sickly.

Along with his signature bright white hair, the most striking aspects of Senator John McCain’s physical appearance are his puffy left cheek and the scar that runs down the back of his neck.

The marks are cosmetic reminders of the melanoma surgery he underwent in August 2000. Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, sometimes tells audiences that he has “more scars than Frankenstein.”

The operation was performed mainly to determine whether the melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer, had spread from his left temple to a key lymph node in his neck; a preliminary pathology test at the time showed that it had not.

But because such a test cannot be definitive, the surgeons, with Mr. McCain’s advance permission, removed the surrounding lymph nodes and part of the parotid gland, which produces saliva, in the same operation, which lasted five and a half hours.

The final pathology analysis showed no evidence of spread of the melanoma, his staff said at the time. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, has said he did not need chemotherapy or radiation.

In 1999, during Mr. McCain’s first race for president, he gave the public an extraordinary look at his medical history — 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records that were amassed as part of a United States Navy project to gauge the health of former prisoners of war. This reporter, who is a physician, interviewed the senator’s doctors in 1999 with his permission.

But this time around, Mr. McCain has yet to make his full medical records or his physicians available to reporters. At least three times since March 2007, campaign officials have told The New York Times that they would provide the detailed information about his current state of health, but they have not done so. The campaign now says it expects to release the information in April.

This is a total hatchet job.  McCain’s disclosure in 1999 was to prove that his years being tortured by Vietnamese socialists hadn’t compromised his health to the point where he can no longer lead.  To date in this primary season his health hasn’t come up as an issue, but we’re still in the early stages of the election season (McCain hasn’t even accepted his party’s nomination yet) and there’s plenty of time for disclosing medical records.  Which, frankly, probably take time to assemble anyway.

So this hit on McCain is unfair because it’s premature.  And also unfair because it doesn’t seem like either of the two Democrat candidates have gotten this sort of cantankerous, adversarial coverage from the Times.  Obama’s wife has been sticking her foot in her mouth on the campaign trail left and right.  A former friend and big-time contributor to Obama (Tony Rezko) is on trial and it appears as though Obama may have engaged in shady real estate deals with him.  Hillary Clinton has yet to disclose her income tax records and also carries all the political baggage of her husband’s administration.

But who is the Times focusing their attention on almost exclusively?  McCain.  And what’s worst, they’re not even going after the guy on the myriad of issues where he deserves to be held accountable.  I’m not a McCain supporter.  I’d like to see reporters expose every wart and wrinkle of his political record.

Yet instead of engaging in legitimate journalism like that, the Times is going after stupid things.  Like bogus sex scandals, melanoma surgeries from nearly a decade ago and the rather absurd question of whether or not McCain is a citizen.

You expect that sort of thing from tabloids, not the biggest newspaper in the nation’s biggest city.