The Hotline: 10/27: Incendiary Charges

The Hotline

10/27: Incendiary Charges

On Friday we observed that Matt Drudge was aggressively promoting a report that a 20-year-old PA female was robbed and mutilated by an African-American male who allegedly wanted to “teach her a lesson” for being a John McCain supporter. It was eventually revealed that the female (a McCain campaign volunteer named Ashley Todd) had “made the whole story up”. Now Talking Points Memo is reporting that McCain’s PA communications director initially “told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story…well before the facts of the case were known or established.” Lefty bloggers are accusing the McCain camp of being both irresponsible and cynical in pushing such a racially charged story before it could be confirmed. Ezra Klein rips the McCain camp for trying “to eke out some temporary political advantage from a brutal street crime (country first, my friends!).”