Quote:
Originally Posted by Enrico Palazzo
Not quite. Of course, right wing hate radio and the White House Propaganda Network, Foxda, won't report the facts, here they are:
She debunks the McCain bullcrap. MSNBC.com elaborates. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports that there was never a plan for Obama to take the press to Landstuhl, despite the claim by McCain folks and others. The plan was to go with his military aide, retired General Scott Gration. The Pentagon said Gration was off-limits because he had joined the campaign -- violating rules that it not be a political stop.
Obama had gone to see wounded troops in Iraq earlier in the week, without even confirming he'd been there. No press, no pictures. He has done the same when he goes to Walter Reed -- never any press.
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Really? Then why didn't tMessiah go by himself?
The Associated Press: Obama camp cites Pentagon in scrapping troop visit
Robert Gibbs (Obama spokesman) said Obama had decided several weeks ago he wanted to visit wounded troops in Germany.
Gibbs disclosed the campaign had been planning for weeks to fly from the German capital to Ramstein so the senator could meet with wounded members of the armed forces at a military hospital in Landstuhl.
He said that the senator was to have left most staff and likely all traveling reporters behind at the airport while he went to the hospital to avoid appearances of a campaign event.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman said Obama was told he could go to Landstuhl, but the visit would have to conform to Defense Department guidelines that restrict political activity on military installation. That meant campaign staff would have been barred from accompanying him, he said.
At the same time, he said, "The Pentagon certainly did not tell the senator he could not visit Landstuhl."
Hot Air » Blog Archive » Phoning it in: Obama calls wounded troops at Landstuhl after skipping visit
It wasn’t the
absence of media that led Obama to cancel the trip, it was the fact that two of his top military advisors, most notably Ret. Gen. Gration, couldn’t go with him because they’re technically campaign personnel and DoD regs prohibit political campaigning at military bases. Why Obama simply didn’t leave the two of them behind and make the trip anyway, your guess is as a good as mine.
On the media angle, see
this exchange on the plane between one of the pool reporters and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs:
Q: The schedule was for this plane, with us in it, to fly to Ramstein. By the way we were expected to pay for the flight, what were you suppose to do with the entourage then?
Gibbs: You would have stayed on the plane.
Q: We would have stayed on the plane, would there have been any pool report?
Gibbs: there may have been, I don’t know if we ever came to a decision on that.
So the press (possibly) wasn’t going to join them in the hospital. Contra the predictable conspiracy theorizing of some nutroots bloggers, who seized on the fact that the military didn’t inform them that this would be regarded as a political event until Wednesday night, Gibbs said he didn’t think the Pentagon had “set them up” and acknowledged that Team Obama has been aware of the political complications for awhile:
Q: When did you originally decide to go?
Gibbs: I have to get you an exact date but it has been on the schedule for a long time.
Q: Did it not occur to anybody that this might be viewed as a political stop?
Gibbs: We had taken some of that into consideration, but we believed that it could be done in a way that would not create, it would not be created or seen as a campaign stop.