You started out your post claiming that the Times did not imply an affair, then proceeded to provide the exact proof that they implied that he had an affair.
Read it again. Slowly:
WASHINGTON Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
That's not implication of an affair. It's the reporting of a legitimate concern over ethics, which also included a denial of an affair from the Senator and the lobbyist.
This team red vs. team blue stuff is destroying this country.
This isn't team red vs. team blue to me. It's team facts vs team falsehood.
I'd really love to know how you actually feel. Is their even the most remote trace of remorse or guilt in violating your own morality and integrity?
Calling you on stuff like this
is an act of morality and integrity.
This type of thing is funny when you claim that your team lost because the ref threw the flag for holding and accompany that statement with the video evidence where your team's safety is clearly holding the receiver.
It's not funny when it's about a Presidential election.
I don't even know what that analogy is supposed to mean, but if you're still suggesting that the Times piece in February cost John McCain the election, let's remember that he won the GOP nomination in August and led Obama in the polls until roughly the week after Sarah Palin's first on-camera interviews.
McCain is a war hero, yet he really had no choice but to not talk as he would have destroyed his family's legacy that his father so patriotically built up. The Vietcong thought he would be the one to talk but he would be the last one to because if he destroyed his family's legacy, he could have never came back to this country.
Not sure that a 17-minute news conference the very next day, with Mrs. McCain at his side, qualifies as "not talking":
McCain Response to <em>New York Times</em> Article
With that said, as a politician he was a shady character.
If that's true, and how you feel, then the Times doing a piece on his imprudence as regards ethics violations or the appearance of them would seem prescient, wouldn't it?
But none of this gives reason to discount or reject this clear example of extreme ideological bias.
The New York Times' piece on the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater scandal came roughly at the same point in the 1992 primary cycle.
The note to readers retraction in it's unprecedented wording for the New York Times I guess can be just an inconvenient truth for those whose morality is compromised, or maybe never has existed. I guess some people are very careful to make sure that their home be mirror free.
The note to readers says "The article did not state, and the Times did not intend to conclude that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Sen. McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust."
And, in fact, the article did not state that and the Times did not conclude that. It appears, however, that fifteen years on, some people think it did.
