The fact that Ashley Todd beat herself up and carved a "B" on her face, only to lie to police and say that a black man sexually assaulted her partially due to her being a McCain volunteer is absolutely disgusting. Clearly this twenty-year old girl needs some serious help. There is a small chance she does not understand that something like this is an incitement for racially-motivated hate crimes. Not long ago in our country, African-Americans were lynched for stories like this, such as the tragic story of Emmett Till.
While Ashley was merely a volunteer, what makes this infinitely worse is that McCain's Pennsylvania Communications Director Peter Feldman actually spread the story around to the press. Feldman's behavior is atrocious especially because this was an on-going investigation until Todd confessed to the truth and that there was no corroboration of that facts. Anyone that dares to call themselves a Communications Director knows better than to whip up a racially-tinged story without having the facts. At least the local media came back to double-check the story (although not until after the put it on their website).
From TPM:
John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."
Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.
The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.
The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.
So McCain's staffer Mr. Feldman acted without regard for the truth and was more reckless than uber hack Matt Drudge. He'll have to make Worst Person in the World for this one. That of course should be the least of his problems, because he really should be charged with a crime for such a racially-motivated maneuver.
