CNNS Finds Backbone! Film at 11!

I know that everybody and his aunt Maude has already weighed in on John McCain’s “Safe Streets Baghdad” meme (see, e.g., links), but there is one wrinkle that doesn’t seem to me to have got the attention it deserves. That would be the extraordinary Monday night blowback from the entire CNN operation to tell McCain that we had it right the first time (here’s a transcript).

Am I the only one that finds this remarkable? The fracas kicked off, of course, a week ago, in a moment of coup de theatre involving McCain and correspondent Michael Ware (transcript – scroll down past Anna Nicole Smith). It was an entertaining moment and stuff like this happens. But one – I – would have expected the suits to be all over this one, falling all over themselves to make nice with McCain and otherwise to cement their reputation as a journalistic lapdog. Instead—this.

Others have suggested that McCain’s new-found truculence against the press is a campaign strategy all its own (“a cunning plan?”). I suppose a febrile imagination can conjure up the image of Ware and McCain hunkered down in the dark corner of some out-of-the-way saloon (“you say this, and then I go ballistic and I say that..”). I’m not that febrile. But I admit I don’t have any ready or obvious explanation why these guys got their back up as fast and as far as they did.