James Taranto made a mistake recently when he linked to a San Francisco Chronicle story about John McCain calling his North Vietnamese Communist captors “gooks.”

He writes

This was sent to us by a reader who had seen it linked yesterday on the Drudge Report, but what we failed to notice is that it was published in February 2000, during McCain’s previous run for the presidency. We wrote about it as if it were news, and we very much regret the error.

Of course, James Kirchick, who dug up dusty old Ron Paul letters from the late twentieth century, won’t be apologizing any time soon. I wrote about the double standard regarding Ron Paul and John McCain here. See also John McCain - Licensed to Hate, from the year 2000.

When McCain referred to his Vietnamese captors as “gooks” months ago, not one journalist objected, and few reported it. His campaign last week said he will discontinue using the term. When he belittled the teenager, according to U.S. News and World Report, “one reporter just begged McCain to shut up and protect himself.” [ Honest John, on the Loose, September 19, 1999] Journalists on board sometimes seem more like campaign aides.

McCain’s bus may be the most celebrated since Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus crisscrossed the U.S. in the days of Barry Goldwater’s campaign. The LSD-ingesting Merry Pranksters on Kesey’s bus sought to create their own magical reality. The assumably sober journalists on McCain’s bus are supposed to find their way to objective reality. [John McCain and the Media: a Buss-Fest or a Bust? by Jeff Cohen, LA Times, February 24, 2000]

Cohen felt that the media rolling over for McCain, and not harrassing him about every remark that could be interpreted as racist, (the way they always do with Pat Buchanan, for example) had ” killed the myth of the liberal news media.” He’s a left-wing media critic. But by the same token, it could just as easily be said to have killed the myth that McCain was a conservative.

The New York Times piece referenced by Gene Healy in Liberty, (quoted below) in which John McCain said that his childhood idol was Napoleon, is this one: P.O.W. to Power Broker, A Chapter Most Telling, By Nicholas D. Kristof, February 27, 2000. It’s certainly worth reading.