The Frankfurter School

Washington DC is just like Hollywood, except with bad suits and less conspicuous drug use. Both are amoral, one-industry towns with an ever-replenishing stream of newcomers clawing their way towards power, and then abusing it as soon as they get any. Both have a fawning press corps who guard their access to power by obediently transcribing whatever is asked of them. (Occasionally, unlike their Washington colleagues, the Hollywood press corps will delve deeply into stories, but only when a star is falling and widely seen as fair game.) In both towns, information is power, gossip is currency, and and both deals and careers are made and lost on information that is common knowledge to the well-connected, but will never make its way into the newspapers.

John McCain, who is nasty and short-tempered, but still adored by the press, revealed just how much contempt powerful people have for both the truth and the general public in an informal moment with a New York Times reporter this week on his campaign plane.

In 2004, it was widely reported that John Kerry reached out to McCain to be his VP running-mate on the Democratic ticket, an offer which McCain not only refused, but denied that they had ever spoken about personally. At a campaign stop this week, McCain referenced that very conversation with Senator Kerry that he had previously claimed not to have had. When the Times reporter attempted to ask him about it, he got very angry and insisted that the line of questioning was silly and irrelevant. “Everybody knows that I had a private conversation. Everybody knows that. That I had a conversation. There’s no living American in Washington” who doesn’t know, McCain said.

What McCain is really saying is, “I deny that my previous denial was truly a denial because everyone in Washington knows the truth, even if it wasn’t reported.”

When “everybody knows” something in Hollywood, it usually involves something like a box office star who is secretly gay, and the lengths to which the star goes to protect his sexual orientation from audiences in Kansas and Ohio. This is very disappointing behavior to gay activists, but ultimately it’s a private choice and it doesn’t make the papers because the press believes that it is not enough in the public’s best interest to risk the inevitable legal action that the reporting would bring. However, when “everybody knows” something in Washington, it’s generally the country’s business; one political party has built its platform on “moral values” and our last President was impeached because he denied rumors of an extra-marital affair. And what of the common knowledge that is about real policy and decisions that will affect the lives of millions of Americans?

What happens to John McCain, who lies and then gets angry when a reporter tries to hold him accountable for his words?

He is called a “straight-talker,” and a “maverick.”