Which is light years away from McCain’s assertion that Romney “suggested secret timetables” and was thus one of the people who “were hedging their bets on Iraq, positioning themselves politically by being deliberately vague on their support for General Petraeus’ new strategy.”

At the very least, McCain was muddling the record. Which has been clear for some time: when the whole Iraq-timetable back-and-forth began last week (on Saturday, as far as I can tell, when the Senator trotted out the accusation against his chief rival at a campaign stop in Orlando), several media organizations went out of their way to clarify the untruth of the claim. “A Misleading Low Blow,” TIME’s Michael Scherer called it. “McCain Stretches Romney’s Words,” The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote. The National Review’s Mark Levin researched Romney’s initial statement and other statements he’d made about timetables, concluding that they “do not support McCain’s accusation.” Even the quotes McCain’s own campaign circulated, the AP noted, “didn’t show Romney making that exact comment—nor did aides back up McCain’s earlier comment that suggested that Romney ‘wanted to set a date for withdrawal.’”

No wonder Romney seemed testy last night. From the looks of things, McCain has been playing him—not to mention much of the political press.

And that latter fact, at least, seems to be a trend. As The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait reported last week, The New York Times let Mac off the hook when it re-printed a prior assertion of his—“Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes. Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues”—without refuting it. “The amazing thing,” Chait wrote, is that the Times “made no effort whatsoever to ascertain the truth of his point. Just the typical, ‘McCain says earth is flat, and meanwhile in other news…’ stuff.” As Matt Yglesias put it this morning:

Mac was not only Back last night, but appears to have made his patently false accusation that Mitt Romney favored a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of his argument at last night’s debate. Shocking stuff. McCain’s made this claim before, everyone who’s looked at it concluded that it wasn’t true, and so McCain … just did it again in a higher-profile forum.

Naturally, Jonathan Martin’s Politico article on the subject was given the headline “Romney falls into McCain trap on Iraq” rather than, say, “McCain Lies His Ass Off.”

The line between spinning and lying, it seems, is one that we in the media haven’t marked clearly enough for ourselves; some discussion and clarification may be in order. Because whatever McCain did—whether he spun or he lied—he seems to have been spared from accountability. And he seems to know it. Real World politics strikes again.

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