I have an amalgamation of my two posts at the Huffington Post on the apparent non-denial denial by McCain of an intervention by any advisers in the matter of his relationship with Vicki Iseman. I start:

There’s been a lot of hay made on right wing blogs, talk radio, and ol’ fashioned cable news today that the New York Times ran an unsourced smear job against John McCain. The goal of this kind of pushback is to discredit the Times reporting on a possible sex scandal, thereby discounting the entire story of corruption, reminiscent to the destruction of Dan Rather’s reporting on George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard. But we cannot allow there to be any adjudication of the accuracy of what the Times’ anonymous “two former associates” said based on the fact that the reports are anonymous, when John McCain has only issued a non-denial denial of the intervention connected to these “two former associates.”

To understand why the relationship between McCain and Iseman should remain an issue – though not the sole issue – under discussion, we need to look at what the Times and the Washington Post have separately reported about the intervention with McCain and what McCain has said in response.

From there, I go through the Times, Post, and McCain’s accounts of what has been said and done. In the end, I continue to see this as an area that the press should seek clarification on from McCain. Parsing and using word-dodges won’t cut it.

Read my full Huffington Post piece here.