McCain’s Early-April Iraq Presser: There WAS Heckling/Giggling

So, the mystery has been solved (HT Hot Air):

Conservative bloggers erroneously accused a CNN reporter of snickering at McCain’s response, setting off a series of accusations that eventually got smoothed over. “But that guy wasn’t even the snickerer,” (64 year-old Berkeley embed Jane) Stillwater said. “I was snickering, but he wasn’t.”

Supposedly this gets CNN’s Michael Ware, who was the originally accused snickerer who denied “heckling” McCain, off the hook.

Baloney.

Ware “cleverly” focused on whether he did any heckling. He was there, and would have heard Stillwater’s giggling. Stillwater only fessed up after McCain insisted that there was giggline at the presser. Ware had every opportunity to acknowledge what happened — that he heard giggling. But instead, by focusing on his behavior only, he left the impression that the tipster to a “blog” of Matt Drudge (that was Ware’s non-naming characterization of Drudge, who, as usual, has been shown to have been fundamentally correct) was lying. He could have cleared things up, but instead scored cheap “journalistic” and political points. What a childish jerk.

This is all part of a larger pattern of conduct and posturing by Ware that explains why he ought to be called CNN’s Enemy Propagandist to the World.

While we’re on it, sfgate.com writer Joe Garofoli gets the runner-up jerk award in this for focusing on how bloggers were wrong about Ware, but ignoring the fact that, in the face of many denials, they were right for weeks about the fact that McCain was indeed heckled/giggled at.