Why Do Newspapers Keep Publishing Op-Eds by John McCain?

[MADem]

1. Because he is a senior senator, because he is old, because he has Vietnam/POW experience,

because he was a standard-bearer for the GOP and a more credible one than Romney (well, until he picked the Wasilla Wackadoodle as his running mate) and because if Obama says UP, he can be damn-tootin'-guar-ON-teed to say DOWN!! DOWN!!!

He provides what the papers like to call "contrast."

They might as well title all his op-eds "ARRRGH! ARRRGH! Get off my lawn!!" because all he does is rail ineffectually at anything the administration does or proposes.

I don't think they give much of a crap about journalistic defensibility. It's more like team sports, and McCain is the captain of the Fiery Assholes. This really IS the bottom line:

But McCain is not a prescient foreign-policy analyst, and newspapers should stop giving him a platform to confidently assert what will happen next in geopolitics. He thinks he knows his stuff. But his track record shows that he's emphatic in his pronouncements even when he is utterly, catastrophically wrong.

Good thing he didn't get elected! There sure as hell IS a difference between the parties...