In an interview with John McCain, CBS scrubbed an erroneous statement by the candidate about the Iraq surge and replaced it with a soundbyte criticizing Obama’s position on the war in Iraq. McCain has been scrambling since the weekend, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview with German magazine Spiegel that he supported Obama’s 16-month plan for troop withdrawal.
Regarding al-Maliki’s statement, more has emerged since the Bush administration seemed to push al-Maliki to backtrack on his statements, and release a statement saying the interview was mistranslated. The New Republic threw water on those reports late yesterday, reporting that al-Maliki actually saw a copy of the interview before it was published and approved it.
Going back to the subject of this post, why is McCain’s gaffe being covered by CBS in favor of a non-sequential soundbyte criticizing his opponent?
Watch the clip, AFTER THE JUMP…
Here’s the portion of the interview CBS edited out:
As Think Progress notes, “In fact, the Sunni revolt against Al-Qaida in Iraq’s Anbar province — commonly referred to as ‘The Awakening’ — ‘began’ long before Bush even announced his ‘surge’ policy in January 2007.” The ‘Awakening’ actually began in September 2006.
