Whoa! this right here is some serious breaking news. The Stranger has standards?

At the Times editors have said, the story 'speaks for itself' (and says volumes)

In a perfect world, a real story about McCain with meat would break, oh, about September sometime. Or the classic October surprise. That would be good. This... does little more than sully the reputation of a decent newspaper.

"In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others."

If I showed up in Washington, could I get that kind of access to a Senator on a repeated basis? I don't care why she had it - flying him around on private jets, her clients campaign contributions, or actually sleeping with him. McCain can have Saturday night orgies for all I care - the issue is what influence did she have. Why do we, as the voters who actually put someone in office, continually have to settle for elected officials who listen far more to people who didn't elect them?

I don't know how it will ever change. Not sure how it could - first amendment and all that.

The slant seems spin-ish to me, as though the paper really wanted to cover this possible affair and quid pro quo legislative maneuvering, and thus found a way to make the article ostensibly focus on something else -- McCain's lack of savvy about appearances. But that something else isn't all that newsworthy, in my book, and they don't come up with all that many examples of it -- the big ones are this possible lobbyist affair and McCain's involvement in the S&L mess. Two incidents over the course of decades in office isn't enough to convince me that he's so idiotically unaware that appearances count that he'd be a bad president for that reason. So, where's the beef, exactly? The real beef is the affair itself, I suspect, and the appearances thing is just the NYT's ketchup.

Because obviously there's no such thing as free press in this country.

This may or may not be true, but it's incredible smoke-and-mirrors stuff. Reminds me of the supermarket rags I pick up when bored in line," A close friend suggested blah and blah." Okay, so if these two "witnesses" gave evidence that cooberated each other, then why not mention what those items were? And maybe McCain's admittance that he "acted inappropriately" was that he was too emotionally close to this woman, or had been too heavily influenced by her-not strictly saying he had an affair.

Ugh, journalism.

Also, McCain's non-denial denial is sort of strange, don't you think?

It seems to me the Times was going to get scooped by someone else if they didn't get out even a highly doctored version. So they put this out, hoping the rest of the details would come out later.

Stranger's "standards' or not, Josh, I think you're wrong about this story, and I hope the journalists for once take the kid gloves off regarding St. John.

Also, these stories end up having more truth than falses in them... think about the lawmakers such as Larry Craig and that other one from Vancouver... more truth than falses...

McCain has a poor moral compass... and I can't in good conscience vote for someone that has that for our president.

it's kind of a messy story, but i think they're just putting it out there to see what happens next.

Now as to The Stranger's standards, well we probably shouldn't get into that.

Thanks for a cogent post, and for concisely placing my vague concerns about the piece into better focus.

What's strange to me is that the diffuse nature of the allegation remained after they sat on this for so many months, THAT they "worked" on it for so many months, with the completely predictable response from the wing-nuts.

The right-wingers would be screaming bias at this article at ANY time between now and November. Because of course, they expect McCain to continue getting the smoothies he continually receives from the compliant press.

Gregor Samsa

P.S. By comment 34, we've seen enough of the "The Stranger HAS STANDARDS?!?" bullshit.