shhh2.GIFEven after the Obama campaign and bloggers like John Cole presented instance after instance showing that Barack Obama's recent Montana comments on his Iraq policy are what he's been saying all along, the GOP/Media Complex still clings to the talking points handed it by the McCain campaign and the RNC's Alex Conant, and desperately so.  They're now having to establish bogus second-order arguments to prop up the original nonsense they were spewing.  (When John Kerry goes on Face the Nation to point out the myriad times John Sidney McCain III has does flip-flops and 180-degree changes of position, Bob Schieffer gets all huffy and whines: “Are you attacking John McCain’s integrity?”  This from the guy who befriended George W. Bush when Bush made his brother Tom the ambassador to Australia and later Japan.)

Meanwhile, John McCain rewards especially obedient "reporters" with VIP seating on his campaign airplane, and that will never get anywhere near the amount of media play as the aforementioned Iraq lie they continue to push.  (Neither will the fact that more Americans find Obama barbecue-friendly, personable and likable -- which normally are big criteria for rib-loving and McCain-loving reporters except when they can't easily pretend that a Republican bests his or her Democratic rivals in these categories.)   In case that wasn't enough, David Broder has issued an ex cathedra pronouncement declaring John McCain to be infallible, just like the Pope: "McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura."    Um, and who established that undeserved reputation for Mister Keating Five McCain?  Why, his buddies in the press -- in other words, people like you, Mr. Broder.

What with all the media fluffing of McCain and stuffing of Obama going on, you'd never know that John McCain's campaign has been getting the snot kicked out of it.   Here's a story that somehow never made it to the same newscasts that were pimping Alex Conant's bogus spinning of Obama's Iraq stance (h/t John Aravosis):

John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement. The GOP presidential candidate trails Democrat Barack Obama in polls, organization and money while trying to succeed a deeply unpopular fellow Republican in a year that favors Democrats.

McCain also doesn't seem to have a coherent message let alone much of a strategy despite securing the nomination three months earlier than Obama....

McCain's troubles are so acute that he recently gave senior adviser Steve Schmidt "full operational control" of the day-to-day campaign and, effectively, scaled back the duties of campaign manager Rick Davis. The shift in responsibilities came after weeks of Republican quibbling that McCain had not adequately made the transition for the fall.

Bob Somerby of Daily Howler fame has said for many years that our illustrious press corps will never admit their own role in shaping the news, much less admit when they are wrong.  They also won't admit, no matter how obvious things such as the events of the past week make it, that they take, and have taken for years, their marching orders from conservatives or from RNC operatives like Alex Conant, or from Steve Schmidt, who now runs the McCain campaign.  Of course they certainly won't admit that they made it possible in 2004 for T. Boone Pickens' gang of "Swift Boat" thugs to push their laughable garbage as fact, instead choosing to pretend that it was John Kerry's fault for trusting that the media would be better than uncritically promote the Swifties' lies.

The whole lefty side of the blogosphere exists because of the things the GOP/Media Complex won't admit.