Snubbing the troops? Only if you are a McCain apologist who can't see the facts...

It's a slow week for McCain, as the media largely ignored him (after all, he wasn't doing anything) and covered Obama's Middle East/European trip. Had to suck for McCain, as he berated Obama repeatedly for not visiting the Middle East (even going so far as to have a counter on his site showing how many days it had been since the Illinois senator and Democratic nominee had visited Iraq). I'm sure McCain is bummed to have his little soundbyte taken away, especially since Obama actually had not only the Iraqi government but the Bush Administration starting to agree with timetables. McCain told him to go learn something...and he did...he learned that his Iraq approach is right after all. And McCain's is still wrong.

So what did McCain do? What any good GOP candidate does when they are out of real ideas. He went on the attack. But what to attack on? Obama did what a candidate and senator should, he visited heads of state, checked the situation in Iraq and Kuwait, visited the troops...

Oh, wait...he was gone while there are serious issues at home (I heard that from a conservative talking head, likely one of the group who had berated him for not going overseas in the first place).

Well, that was lame, as it was McCain who was so insistent that he should go.

So...what was there to attack? Well, Obama got to Germany, and then canceled a visit with wounded troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. WOW!!! BATTLESTATIONS, BATTLESTATIONS, WE HAVE A CHANCE TO SAY A LIBERAL HATES TROOPS!!!

Maybe McCain's campaign does need Rove's help, because he can't seem to come up with anything original or even factual on his own. Click the title link to see:

A new McCain ad says Obama "made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras."

McCain's facts are literally true, but his insinuation – that the visit was canceled because of the press ban or the desire for gym time – is false. In fact, Obama visited wounded troops earlier – without cameras or press – both in the U.S. and Iraq. And his gym workouts are a daily routine.

The Obama campaign canceled the visit with wounded troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Obama says, when he learned that the Pentagon would not allow him to bring along a retired Air Force major general who is serving as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign. Obama says that "triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political."

I go to work today and what to I hear from conservatives? "Obama wouldn't visit troops without the cameras there!" And even after reading this article, they argued that his reasons for not visiting was that he couldn't have "the cameras on him".

Yet as the FactCheck article stated, he visited troops without cameras or press before. So that obviously...OBVIOUSLY...wasn't the reason.

Need to see/hear it again...click here and read:

MSNBC's Tamron Hall noted that Sen. John McCain was "ripping" Sen. Barack Obama "for not visiting wounded American troops" on his "global tour," then aired a clip from an ad released by McCain's campaign which asserts that Obama "made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops." Hall did not note that, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell previously reported, Obama did in fact visit wounded troops on his trip while in Iraq, going to "a casualty unit in the Green Zone without photographers as part of the congressional delegation."

So according to the conservatives, Obama won't visit troops unless he gets a PR/photo-op...except when he actually does visit troops without photographers.

So which is it? Will he visit troops without the press, or won't he? Well, obviously he did visit wounded troops without the press. Both here in the U.S. (Walter Reed), and in Iraq (the Green Zone casualty unit).

So why did he cancel the visit in Germany? Back to FactCheck:

At first, it seemed the Obama camp was blaming the Pentagon for the cancellation. Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Jonathan Scott Gration, an Obama adviser who had planned to accompany him to Landstuhl, issued a statement saying, "We learned from the Pentagon last night that the visit would be viewed instead as ... a campaign event." That prompted a response from Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, who said, "Sen. Obama is more than welcome to visit Landstuhl or any other military hospital around the world. ... But he has to do so, just as any other senator has to do so, in his official capacity. It is not acceptable to do so as a candidate." Los Angeles Times reporters Michael Finnegan and Peter Spiegel went on to quote Morrell as saying, "In an election year ... I don’t believe that any candidate is allowed to visit a DOD facility with press."

Gibbs, and later Obama himself, then confirmed that it was the Obama campaign and not the Pentagon that decided to scrub the visit. Obama told the press that he had never planned to take reporters inside: "We were treating it the same way we treat a visit to Walter Reed ... without any fanfare whatsoever." And he said the discovery that Gration would not be allowed to come prompted the cancellation.

Obama: And we got notice that [Gration] would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn’t on the Senate staff. That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political.

So now we have it...a legitimate concern that the visit would be perceived as a campaign event, raised by the Pentagon officials, and Obama made a judgment call to avoid the perception of using the troops in a campaign visit. Even Chuck Hagel, a Republican, said that McCain is out of the box with this attack:

The Republican senator from Nebraska agreed, saying on Face The Nation that the GOP's presumptive nominee is "treading on some very thin ground here when he impugns motives, and when we start to get into 'You're less patriotic than me, I'm more patriotic.'

"They're better off to focus on policy differences," he said.

"It's just not responsible to be saying things like that, again, if for no other reason than for the good of this country and the world.

"One of these two men, on January 20th of next year, is going to have to bring this country together, and the world, to deal with huge problems. I think the next president is going to inherit an inventory of challenges as big as Franklin Roosevelt inherited on March 4, 1933."

In the same article, we once again see that Obama did indeed visit troops off-camera in his official capacity as a visiting member of Congress:

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who also accompanied Obama to Afghanistan and Iraq this week, called the ad "completely distorted."

"Senator Hagel, Senator Obama and I visited the combat support hospital in Baghdad to thank those nurses, those doctors, to see patients that were there, to bring a bit of greetings from home and profound thanks," he said. "That should be in the ad that Senator McCain is running.

"I think Senator Obama made a very wise choice [about Germany]. Any suggestion that a visit to a military hospital would be political, he made the wise choice not to go.

"But when we were in Baghdad, we made a point, at the end of a very exhausting day, to go in and see these magnificent young Americans and those doctors and nurses that give such tremendous care - without a lot of fanfare, just to say 'Thanks.'

"We went to Jalalabad to see the soldiers of the 173rd. We stopped in Basra to see our soldiers down there. We went into Anbar province to see soldiers there."

Wow...Obama visited troops all over the place, all WITHOUT CAMERAS ROLLING, very appropriately doing so as a United States Senator. Because the Middle East leg of his trip was done in an official capacity as a Senator, not as a campaigning candidate.

Europe was different...he went there as a campaigning candidate, not in his official Senate capacity. With that in mind, his cancellation to avoid the perception of using the troops to campaign is not only understandable, it was a wise decision.

But do the conservatives and the McCain campaign see all the other visits to troops in his trip? No, they only see the opportunity to score cheap political points and further their distorted claim that Obama is somehow not patriotic enough. It's more of the typical Bush-era tactic of questioning the patriotism of anyone who doesn't take the GOP line on foreign policy.

Why do attacks like this? Well, it's becoming more and more apparent that McCain can't take Obama on legitimate ground. A seasoned long-term senator, a war hero and celebrated veteran, yet at best he's statistically tied with Obama, and many polls show him lagging by several points. McCain, with his maverick record and appeal across party lines, should be a shoo-in, but he's very likely going to lose his last real shot at the White House (at 72 on Inauguration Day, he'd be far too old to run in 2012 or 2016 if he loses this year). Yet he's adopted a Bush-like stance on many key issues, and it's hurting him severely, with Obama being seen as a very attractive alternative to the status quo in Washington. After all, who, even in the GOP, wants four more years of largely Bush policies?

So McCain is more and more taking the tack of attacking on theatrical issues rather than issues of substance. This is another example, and it says much more uncomplimentary things about McCain than it does about Obama.

Technorati Tags: Politics, McCain, Obama, False Attack Ads, Questioning Patriotism