A couple weeks back, we got a copy of a letter that had been sent to the McCain campaign by a publicist at Workman Books, whose name and phone number and email had been blacked out. The basic gist of the letter was that Republican presidential candidate John McCain probably wasn’t as computer illiterate as his detractors had been making him out to be: “LIke millions of Americans, he probably just needs a little help catching up,” the letter said, and wasn’t it a nice coincidence that Workman was the publisher of Is This Thing On?, and could make the author, Abby Stokes, available for “a special one-on-one training session” at Sen. McCain’s convenience? Cute, we thought, but unless he took her up on it, we didn’t really see much of a story, even if Politico did.
Instead of arranging for that lesson, though, it appears the McCain campaign may have leaked a copy of that letter to right-wing blogger Jeff Emanuel over at Red State. That copy was not redacted, so Emanuel knew it was sent by Workman’s Oleg Lyubner, and he decided to teach Lyubner a lesson in humility by writing a big, nasty blog post calling the publicist a “media whore” who must have been making fun of the injuries McCain suffered when he was being held captive by the VietCong. (No, really, that’s his logic.) To hammer the point home, Emanuel printed Lyubner’s work phone number and email address and pointedly invited Red State readers to make use of them.
“It’s been pretty crazy here today,” Lyubner conceded when we called him this morning, citing more than a dozen hostile phone calls and emails. “But all the people who’ve been calling and emailing—I don’t think they actually bothered to read the letter.” Nothing in the letter, he told us, could be construed as making fun of McCain’s war injuries. He also sent us a copy of a letter he sent to Emanuel in which he notes that “a basic Google search on John McCain’s injuries and his ability to type… turned up quite a few images of John McCain using a Blackberry, as well as [a] plethora of information on voice-activated software that allows the use of a computer without a keyboard.” (Most of those pictures look like he’s using a cell phone to us, but he’s definitely got a BlackBerry in one of them. Personally, given our own physical discomfort at typing on a computer keyboard for long periods of time—when we’ve never so much as had an arm bone broken by accident—we are not unsympathetic to the idea that Sen. McCain might not care to spend a lot of time at the computer… but we also saw nothing in Lyubner’s letter to indicate that he was mocking McCain’s physical impairments.)
Lyubner also repudiates Emanuel’s claim that he waited three weeks after the letter appeared at Politico before actually sending it to McCain, and the accusation that he was the one who leaked it back then. He certainly wasn’t the one who sent it to us, for what that’s worth.
“I understand the nature of your blog and the purpose its constant hysterical sloganeering about ‘liberal elitism’ serves, as well as the parroting of one campaign’s talking points,” Lyubner tells Emanuel. “I still can’t help being baffled as to what you (and the McCain campaign) tried to accomplish by directing some ridiculous hate mail my way—if it was a pathetic attempt at intimidation, I can assure you of its utter failure.” If anything, he told us, all this fuss is drumming up real publicity for the book.