Captain's Quarters -

John Weaver has issued a statement that exposes the New York Times story on John McCain as a hack job. Part of their supposed corroboration of the gossip about an allegedly budding romance between McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman was his alleged intervention to stop it. Weaver, who no longer works for the campaign, says he told the Times that his intervention had nothing to do with an affair: "The New York Times asked for a formal interview and I said no and asked for written questions. The Times knew of my meeting with Ms. Iseman, from sources they didn't identify to me, and asked me about that meeting. I did not inform Senator McCain that I asked for a meeting with Ms. Iseman. Her comments, which had gotten back to some of us, that she had strong ties to the Commerce Committee and his staff were wrong and harmful...

UPDATE: Today's AOL Hot Seat poll question comes from this post: embedSWF(9, 0, 0, "widget", "recent")This content requires the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player. Get this version below:Get Flash I have more links at the bottom from my posts yesterday on this topic. Original post follows ... ======== The New York Times may have done the impossible for the John McCain campaign and for Republicans in general. As predicted yesterday when their strange and threadbare allegations hit print, the attack united conservatives behind McCain. It also may have been an act of seppuku for the Times, as its claim objectivity and credibility have been discredited. The Los Angeles Times surveys the damage: Conservative commentators, including some who previously chastised McCain for not hewing closely to their principles, leaped to the candidate's defense. Radio personality Laura Ingraham, like other critics, noted that the newspaper had been researching the...

John McCain wasted no time getting in front of the media to deny the paper-thin allegations leveled by the New York Times. He appeared at a press conference with his wife Cindy at his side, from his latest campaign stop in Toledo. He denied that anyone ever "confronted" him about his relationship with Vicki Isemen at least twice: Q. Senator, did you ever have any meeting with any of your staffers in which they would have intervened to ask you not to see Vicki Iseman or to be concerned about appearances of being too close to a lobbyist? A. No. Q. No meeting ever occurred? A., No. Q., No staffer was ever concerned about a possible romantic relationship? A. If they were, they didn't communicate that to me. Q. Did you ever have such a relationship? A. No. One can't get any plainer than this. If the Times' central support...

A day after insinuating that John McCain had an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, all of the romance appears to have disappeared from the New York Times. Faster than one can say Roberta Flack, the flak taken by the Gray Lady has apparently resulted in a Soviet-style purge of the sexual allegations from their story. Recall this in paragraph 2 of the original article: A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity. Tom Maguire notes that now, Eastasia has never been at war with Oceania -- er, the story...

On Thursday, New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller hysterically accused the John McCain campaign of "wag[ing] a war" on the Gray Lady simply by issuing a clear and calm denial of Keller's smear. If that's true, then give Times public editor Clark Hoyt conscientious objector status. Hoyt wants no part of defending Keller or his journalists, which he makes clear in a stinging rebuke: The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof, like the text messages between Detroit’s mayor and a female aide that...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will never get mistaken as a conservative publication. It routinely editorializes in support of liberal causes and candidates, and it has come in for plenty of criticism for its decisions on publication decisions. They also routinely publish stories from their subscription to the New York Times syndication product. Today, however, David McCumber explains why he took a pass on the Times' hit piece on John McCain: Obviously, the reporters, Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick and Stephen Labaton, are not working for me. I have no way, other than their excellent reputations, of specifically evaluating their sourcing. That job fell to Bill Keller, the editor of The New York Times, who had held the story, citing concerns about whether the reporters had "nailed it," long enough to fatally fracture the newspaper's relationship with Thompson. She left today to go back to work for The Washington...

The New York Times launches its long-awaited smear of John McCain today, and the most impressive aspect of the smear is just how baseless it is. They basically emulate Page Six at the Post, but add in a rehash of a well-known scandal from twenty years ago to pad it out and make it look more impressive. In the end, they present absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing -- only innuendo denied by all of the principals: Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers. A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately...