Talk about missing the point. Robert Pear of the New York Times writes:

Senator John McCain takes pride in his unwavering support for members of the armed forces. So when Senator Barack Obama criticized him on Thursday on the Senate floor, his response was scathing.

True enough, but while quoting McCain’s “scathing” response, Pear does not tell readers what prompted it. He writes that it was touched off by the following statement:

I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country. . . But I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this G.I. Bill.

That seems innocuous. Why would it prompt a “scathing” reply? Might this perhaps be evidence of the candidate’s supposedly volatile temperament? Readers of the Times might think so because Pear conveniently left off the rest of Obama’s statement. Here is what Obama actually said:

 I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country. . .but I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the president more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.

The truly objectionable part of Obama’s statement is the last sentence, which the Times didn’t quote — the sentence in which he accuses McCain of “partisan posturing” at the expense of veterans. That’s a pretty rich accusation for someone who has never served in uniform to make against one of our greatest military heroes. No wonder McCain was steamed. He had every right to be. And given the Times’s distortion of this dispute, McCain should be even more aggrieved today. But then he wouldn’t expect anything different from the Newspaper of Record, which seems to have morphed into an unregistered lobbyist for the Obama campaign. (Full disclosure: I’m a foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign.)