I think that the noise machine is a little worried about this McCain useful fiction about Iran and Al Qaeda. Some Weekly Standard propagandists crashed a conference call with the National Security Network, trying to take the bullet for McCain's lies. The insaneosphere thinks McCain was only wrong by backing down on the "obvious" Iran-Al Qaeda connections. I heard Joe Scarborough try to defend McCain on the basis that he was tired, and smugly mused that such a line of argument won't push white voters in Missouri away from him in November.
I'm not sure why they're so worried about it. The media types who would supposedly hold this over McCain's head are so ignorant themselves about geopolitics that they'll blurt out the same mistakes without thinking.
Certainly we know the GOP's playbook for November: throw up more lies and obfuscations about scary furriners while running an explicitly racial campaign designed to frighten everyday people about the opponent (and if Hillary pulls this out, it'll be an explicitly sexist campaign). I really don't see why the media will throw up a roadblock against that. They don't have a whole lot more knowledge about the world than John McCain does; and they prefer to "cover the controversy" rather than referee it. The press has done little more than amplify these lies over the last several years. And the GOP manages that by yelling and screaming a lot and muddying the waters, so maybe that's all that's going on here.
Maybe the GOP understands that the public has turned against the war and the Republican brand, distrust the media (see the Tweety Effect), and will find alternative means to make their decisions about the next President and who will lead the Congress. McCain looked like either a devious warmonger or a fool today, and the war machine has already cried wolf on this one. The parallels to the Cheney Administration are undeniable, with all the weasel words and carefully selected language designed to conflate and confuse and muddle. The danger here is not a media hit; it's that people will recognize the singularity of McSame.
UPDATE: By the way, I think what Digby noted last week about the power of repetition and how it tricks us certainly applies here. Not just about Iran/Iraq/Al Qaeda conflation, but the idea that McCain is so knowledgeable about foreign policy and couldn't possibly make a mistake of such magnitude. It's extremely difficult to combat.