The Media Research Center has decided: The media is not allowed to reference John McCain’s age, or even to say something that might possibly obliquely refer to it.
A May 8 NewsBusters post by Geoffrey Dickens (and a May 9 MRC CyberAlert item) declared that NBC’s Ann Curry has an “obsession” with McCain’s age — all she did was ask Cindy McCain whether her husband can handle the job of president at his age — and that Curry is part of a “not-so-quiet, whisper campaign against the Arizona Senator this fall: that too he’s old to be President.”
And in a May 13 NewsBusters post, Mark Finkelstein has decided that Obama’s statement that “We’re not going to let John McCain wander around in those states unchallenged anymore” is playing the age card:
Wander around? Like the nice ol’ feller found ambling down the street in his bathrobe who has to be gently led back home?
[…]Will the MSM take note? Not that McCain would, but imagine if he were to invoke Obama’s race in similarly subtle terms. I’d say the liberal media would be in an uproar.
That’s right — things that might be interpreted by conservatives to refer to McCain’s age are verboten.