It's Not How McCain Said It; It's What He *Said*

As you will no doubt be aware, last Wednesday Senator John McCain called a press conference to denounce the Obama Administration's lack of forthrightness on the subject of the Benghazi attack, at the same precise moment that the Obama Administration was briefing the senate on the subject of the Benghazi attack. At the end of the press conference the senator did not take questions, but the following morning CNN producer Ted Barrett managed to catch up with him and ask why he would express outrage over an apparent cover-up by the White House, instead of attending a meeting in which the facts as we know them were being presented by the White House.

As you will no doubt be aware, the senator's reaction was blistering and profane. McCain refused to comment about why he missed the briefing -- which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials -- instead becoming increasingly testy when pressed to explain why he wasn’t there. “I have no comment about my schedule and I’m not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media,” McCain said. Asked why he wouldn’t comment, McCain grew agitated. “Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?” When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, “I’m upset that you keep badgering me.”

This story has been all over the political news, from mainstream outlets to amateur bloggers and back again, with withering coverage of McCain's once-again-proven inability to contain his emotions. Comment threads below the various stories about this incident have described Mr. McCain as a sore-headed old crank, and even some members of his own party have apparently wondered aloud at his judgment, with Senator Susan Collins referring to the proposed formation of a special investigative committee by noting that the existing Select Committee on Intelligence is already co-chaired by "Senator Carl Levin, who was at the White House briefing on Wednesday, and by Senator John McCain, who was not."

The admittedly unflattering narrative of this event, we are to believe, is that Mr. McCain is too short-tempered for either his own good or that of his party.  It's a fun story to see covered this way, not least because journalists are finally beginning to wonder -- albeit implicitly, at least for the most part -- what the Administration would stand to gain by misrepresenting what it knew and when it knew it regarding an attack on one of our consulates. Mostly, however, the coverage has been conspicuously confined to the emotional temperature of McCain's reply to Barrett. There's only one small problem with journalists covering the McCain outburst in this fashion, which is that is misses the point as completely as if they'd reported on a show-jumping competition instead.
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