Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a scheduled visit to wounded US soldiers in a medical facility at Landstuhl, Germany because he could not be accompanied by press photographers provoked criticism from the McCain campaign, and the New York Times is on the job today to explain “it wasn’t really like that.”

It wasn’t the case, you see, that Barack Obama blew off wounded soldiers when he found he couldn’t exploit visiting them for personal political gain. No, no, no. He is so high-minded and idealistic a guy that he realized that

Even him going alone would likely be characterized by some as a political event,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview on Monday, adding, “He decided not to put the troops in that position.”

So he gave up the visit in order to spare the troops.

These scruples didn’t stop him from posing for this 2:06 video

And he seems to have plenty to say about how he visited troops here.