Kurtz: McCain is a cranky old man that got caught in a lie

Crooks and Liars:

On Reliable Sources, Kurtz gets the panel to admit that the media is part of the McCain bubble and basically an extension of his campaign team in not so many words. And he’s cranky and he lies—Oh, my! And hey, Bumiller is new to the campaign so she doesn’t know how to play McCain’s game.


KURTZ: But that suggests that the people who have been traveling with him regularly…

COX: Yes.

KURTZ: … become part of the bubble, part of the team?

COX: Become part of the bubble, and also, I mean, I think what happens is that you — if you’ve been covering him for a long time, there’s a sense that, well, he does that all the time, it’s not worth reporting, because he does — he’s a cranky old man. I mean, to be quite frank. You know, like, and also, I’ve gotten much tougher terseness than Bumiller got just there. And…

COX: But the cameras weren’t rolling. And also, we wrote it off to, like, you know, he hadn’t had his fifth cup of Starbucks today.

KURTZ: But is there a tendency for journalists to cut more slack for candidates who they have a lot of opportunity to talk, not necessarily because they like them, but because they’re not just getting one crack at that person for eight minutes every three days?

TAPPER: Yes. And that’s the exchange that the McCain people make now, and we’ll see if it lasts until November. But, you know, they have this constant access. I spent a couple weeks ago — I did a couple days with each of the candidates, Obama, Clinton, McCain. And I got more time with McCain — not just me, all of the press corps — in one day than I had gotten with the other two candidates the entire time.

And that’s the exchange. And from 80 percent of the time it’s to McCain’s benefit and 20 percent it’s not. But two points to make about that exchange.
One is “The New York Times” is not currently his favorite newspaper. And the other point is Elizabeth Bumiller was catching him in a lie that he told in 2004. He had been lying. He said no, he hadn’t had that conversation. So it was, by definition, a “gotcha” question, and he doesn’t like that, but he especially doesn’t like “The New York Times.“