McCain Cheats At Saddleback Forum

There was a story last night on DailyKos, suggesting that McCain sounded like he knew some of the questions in advance. I was skeptical, because McCain's answers just weren't that good. But I do have to admit that McCain was a bit more on-point than he usually is during these Q&A sessions.

But we were assured by Rich Warren that McCain was in a "cone of silence" during Obama's portion of the debate, so there is little chance he could have heard the questions in advance - right?

Wrong. It turns out that McCain didn't even arrive at Saddleback until 30 minutes into Obama's interview. He could have easily listened/watched the first half of the debate, giving him a key advantage because he could prepare answers ahead of time.

Here is a video of Pastor Warren admitting that McCain arrived late, even though the nation was told that McCain was in a "cone of silence":



This is fairly scandalous. Maybe McCain didn't listen to the first half, but that really doesn't matter. This is a presidential election, this is big time stuff, McCain shouldn't have even been in a position to cheat. Rick Warren should have not started the forum until after McCain was properly sequestered.

Nate Silver:

Sanchez has now suggested that Warren implied to him that he (Warren) thought McCain was in the "cone of silence" when he told the audience as much, but later learned that McCain was not.

This is highly despicable behavior, folks, on the part of McCain, Warren or possibly both. There's simply no way around it....

Whether Warren actually believes that McCain heard the questions or not is immaterial. Warren, evidently, considers both McCain and Obama to be friends, and he takes them at their word.

But the point is, there were supposed to be controls in place that prevented this situation from arising -- a situation where McCain was in a position to cheat without any consequence for having done so. Those controls broke down. We need to learn more about what those controls were, and why they broke down.

Jed Report:

But I will again make this simple point: the issue isn't whether or not McCain broke the rules so he could cheat, it's that by breaking the rules he cast a shadow over the whole process.

It's just like his relationship with his top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann. Scheunemann has received $800,000 from the government of Georgia, and until March worked for them. Because of that, whether or not his advice is right, there is a cloud of suspicion over the McCain campaign.

What we're now learning is that the McCain campaign thinks they play by different rules than anybody else.

They don't have that right. Nobody does.

And of course, the McCain campaign is once again exploiting McCain's POW history to shield him from any insinuation that he would cheat. Pathetic.