You just know that the Grey Lady is dying to question the timing, but had to soft shoe around it, and call it “fortuitous”

 Senator John McCain congratulated President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia on Wednesday for the Colombian government’s rescue of 15 hostages, including three Americans, held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a Marxist-inspired insurgency that Mr. McCain repeatedly criticized this week during a trip to Latin America.

“This is great news,” Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign plane enroute to Mexico City from Cartagena, Colombia, after Mr. Uribe called Mr. McCain in the air to inform him of the success of the operation. “Thank God they are released.”

The timing of the rescue, which occurred while Mr. McCain was in Colombia, was in many ways a fortuitous turn of events for a presidential candidate who is using a three-day trip to South America and Mexico to try to show that he is a more agile foreign policy hand than his Democratic competitor, Senator Barack Obama. Although the timing of the rescue was a coincidence and Mr. McCain’s trip to Colombia had nothing to do with it, the event nonetheless put him in the middle of classified talks about covert operations with the head of another government.

I think we need to have some sort of congressional hearing over this! Maybe another one of those basement ones by John Conyers with the Be A Judge! playset from Toys R Us.

Update: Allahpundit catches MSNBC soft toeing the “question the timing” meme which is going around the left-o-sphere.