Your assignment, Pensito Reviewers, is to take a quick bathroom break, grab the beverage of your choice, and then settle in and read “Loving John McCain” by Eric Alterman and George Zornick in its entirety.

Until you do, you won’t understand the media’s treatment of McCain, and the damage this love affair could do to our country if it causes us to elect another dumb, affable, incompetent, corrupt, jellyfish puppet with malevolent advisers in the shadows.

The authors first explain the startling banal reasons reporters love McCain.

In his book Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, Tucker Carlson explains the source of many journalists’ attraction to the Arizona senator: “McCain ran an entire presidential campaign aimed primarily at journalists…To a greater degree than any candidate in thirty years, McCain offered reporters the three things they want most: total access all the time, an endless stream of amusing quotes, and vast quantities of free booze.” Ryan Lizza, reporting for The New Yorker from the current Straight Talk, notes the dichotomy of McCain’s press-friendly campaign style and that of his opponents: “The Democratic candidates rarely speak to the traveling press. McCain not only packs his bus with reporters (whom he often greets with an affectionate ‘Hello, jerks!’) but talks until the room is filled with the awkward silence of journalists with no more questions.”

…McCain flatters the press in other ways as well. For instance, he is particularly adept at embracing reporters’ romantic notions of themselves as tough-minded, hard-charging opponents of power, particularly conservative power.

Yes folks, it’s that easy to get reporters eating out of your hand. And well worth it, too.

McCain’s legendary diversionary walks from the path of the Republican straight-and-narrow so impressed his friends in the media that they appeared to have passed a secret law among themselves never to refer to the senior Arizona senator without also using the word “maverick.” As David Brock and Paul Waldman demonstrate in their book Free Ride, the words “maverick” and “McCain” appeared within ten words of each other 2,114 times in 2000, a practice that has continued to the present at roughly the same rate.

…Just as the media-promoted notion that George W. Bush was the kind of guy with whom one might enjoy a few beers managed to obscure the predictable catastrophes that lay in store for this nation once he became President, so too can the deep-seated media denial of McCain’s extremist policies and addiction to political expediency mask the fact that his victory in November would result in a continuation–and even, in some instances, an expansion–of the very policies that have brought the nation to the brink of irreversible disaster.

They also confuse the public.

…the effects of past coverage can be discerned in the results of another survey released in May, by the Pew Research Center, which found that most voters described McCain as “a centrist whose views are fairly close to their own.” …McCain’s voting record in 2005-06 would place him second in the contest for America’s most conservative senator in the 109th Congress and eighth in the 110th Senate. McCain supported Bush in 95 percent of his votes in 2007 and has managed to achieve a perfect 100 percent score so far in 2008.

But voter ignorance in the case of the “real McCain” is hardly the fault of the voters. They are simply consuming news reports from media that refuse to take McCain’s politics seriously.

The authors go on to show case after case of press favoritism shown their darling.

Media love for John McCain manifests itself in myriad ways; sometimes it involves inventing facts, other times simply ignoring inconvenient ones. For instance, we learn from Media Matters that McCain made an April 1 appearance at elite Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, during his “biography” tour. But when CNN reported on the visit four days later, Jim Acosta failed to mention that McCain happened to be a graduate of this very same (very expensive) boarding school. Similarly, on the April 18 edition of The Situation Room, an onscreen chart showed McCain’s income to be significantly lower than that of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when combined with the income of their spouses. However, the chart did not include any income earned by McCain’s spouse, Cindy, whose inherited beer-distributorship fortune is estimated to be valued in nine figures.

McCain’s journalistic friends might be simply helping him be himself, only better, according to Alterman and Zornick.

Perhaps these writers and editors were crediting McCain with views he never had and statements he never made. This turns out to be a common practice within the MSM. During a March 28 interview with Senator Chuck Hagel, Charlie Rose informed viewers that McCain “early on call[ed] for the firing of [former Defense] Secretary Rumsfeld.” Two days earlier, on MSNBC Live, chief Washington correspondent and host Norah O’Donnell informed viewers that McCain had “called for Don Rumsfeld’s resignation.” Earlier in the month, on March 5, CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger told viewers of The Situation Room that “McCain has said over and over again, you know, ‘I would have fired Donald Rumsfeld’…. He called for him to be fired while…in the Senate.” Alas, though McCain did, like many conservatives, criticize Rumsfeld on occasion, he most definitely never called for the Defense Secretary to resign. Just hours before Rumsfeld’s “resignation” was announced, in fact, McCain was asked by Fox News’s Shepard Smith, “Does Donald Rumsfeld need to step down?” McCain’s answer: it was “a decision to be made by the President.”

When members of the media do report McCain’s misstatements on foreign policy, they tend to discount them, apologize for them or explain what the senator undoubtedly “meant” to say.

The result is a picture painted for the American people that is so far removed from reality, voters are being cheated of the information they need to make sound decisions.

Let’s take a moment to sum up: the anti-torture candidate supports torture. The pro-immigration candidate opposes immigration. The candidate who opposes tax cuts for the rich supports them. The pro-campaign finance reform candidate has a campaign that is run almost exclusively by lobbyists, and exploits loopholes in the law to skirt spending limits–even the laws the candidate wrote. The candidate who opposes “agents of intolerance” in the Republican Party embraces them. The candidate with the foreign policy experience frequently confuses Sunnis and Shiites and misreads Iranian influence in the region, but is proposing permanent war. The candidate who claims to be a fiscal conservative wants to bust the budget. The candidate who claims to take global warming seriously does not want to take any serious action to address it.

If this all sounds depressingly familiar, it should. After all, the same press corps that ignored Jeff Gannon, the Valerie Plame leak, Cheney’s secret energy panel, torture and Downing Street memos, and so many other outrages we are still living with. Read the article. All of it.