Posted by Jed Lewison on Wed Jul 30, 2008 at 3:00 AM Pacific

Might as well frame this one

::: :::

Well this is a nice surprise: The Washington Post's Michael Shear and Dan Balz completely annihilate John McCain's dishonorable Landstuhl attack in no uncertain terms:

For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.

Also, Lynn Sweet takes a whack at all the Republican lies, demonstrating how they willfully misinterpreted her reporting, even taking advantage of a server glitch to distort what she had said.

Shear and Balz had posted their story online earlier on Tuesday, probably in response to Jeff Zeleny's lame New York Times article (in which he suggested McCain's gym attack wasn't entirely accurate because Obama also did a CNN interview). Although Shear and Balz had done some top-notch reporting, I was disappointed with the way they had written the article -- the charges weren't debunked until the fourth paragraph.

Now, however, their article is much, much stronger. I don't know what the process was by which they edited their initial drafts, but the results are terrific. Their lede and their headline matches their reporting. My only complaint is that it took us 4 or 5 days to get to this point.