Politico isn't holding back its tilt at the end of this campaign. Here's a headline from Wednesday: "The return of mean John McCain." Reporter Burgess Everett began: "Mean John McCain is back on the campaign trail."
Return to mean? Everett dug up AP bias from 2008: "He’s called fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa a 'f——- jerk' and former Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, also of the GOP, an 'ass——' — just two examples from a 2008 Associated Press story about 'Senator Hothead.'”
“I will not go into a state that has a sitting colleague,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key surrogate for Democrats in conservative states, said in an interview last month. “It’s just a horrible precedent.”
Politico tweeted it as well:
Mean John McCain is back on the campaign trail. http://t.co/MkQ31bMZeL | AP Photo pic.twitter.com/p2oXLNWymf
— POLITICO (@politico) October 30, 2014
Everett suggested it's incredibly rude to campaign against the other party's Senators, quoting Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia: “I will not go into a state that has a sitting colleague...It’s just a horrible precedent.”
Politico is most outraged by his campaigning against several female Democrats:
This week, the Arizona Republican has harshly attacked two Democrats whom he may have to serve with in 2015: Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. The women aren’t just fellow senators — they also serve on the Armed Services Committee that McCain likely will lead if Republicans take control of the Senate.
On Monday, the famously outspoken senator said Shaheen has not been a “serious member” of the panel. And he knocked Hagan in strident terms on Tuesday for missing a briefing about Islamic State militants to raise money in New York in February — six months before the terror network began beheading Americans.
“Here we are with Americans being beheaded, and Sen. Hagan doesn’t even show up for the briefing,” McCain said during an event in North Carolina, according to The Charlotte Observer. “She goes to a fundraiser instead.”
He also blasted Shaheen in her own backyard. At an American Legion post in Nashua, New Hampshire, McCain said she showed little independence from her party and lacked engagement on the panel.
“I don’t see her at very many of the hearings,” McCain said, according to New Hampshire Journal. “I have not seen her really active in the committee.”
McCain saves most of his "vitriol" for Obama, reported Everett as he wrapped up:
Although McCain has not shied away from lashing his current, and potentially future, colleagues, he still saves most of his vitriol for the Obama administration. In Charlotte on Tuesday, he said the Islamic State is “winning” against the administration and he turned from bashing Shaheen on Monday to criticizing the administration’s response to the Ebola virus crisis.
Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby got the worst of it. Last week, McCain called him an “idiot” on a right-leaning radio station — an insult Kirby has ignored
