Richard Cohen Fillets John McCain

This column may come up for discussion tomorrow. When the title of the article is “The Ugly New McCain” and the author is a self-professed McCain flak, you’ve got problems. The money shot:

The precise moment of McCain’s abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on “The View,” the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig — an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergartners.

“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like “Home Cooking” or “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation “I approve this message” was just boilerplate. But he didn’t.
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“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most.

A stunning indictment from one of Washington’s most prominent villagers.

Obama Camp: McCain’s Economy Comments an “Enormous” Mistake

McCain made a huge blunder this morning, and don’t think that the Obama team didn’t notice:

The Obama campaign will seize on comments John McCain made at an event in Florida this morning to portray the Republican ticket as fundamentally out of touch with American voters.

McCain, speaking before a town hall meeting, said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” before adding the caution that “these are very, very difficult times and I promise you we will never put America in this position again.”

An Obama aide calls the first part of McCain’s sentence “an enormous mistake,” and said that the campaign will seek to amplify the comment through surrogates, principles and maybe even television ads.

This should be part of a multi-pronged attack on McCain.

1) Attack him personally for his outrageous lies, which the below ad does quite well:

2) Go after him on his economic ignorance. Comments from McCain like the above should be easy pickings. Attack him relentlessly, and it’s heartening to see that they plan to do just that.

This Is What I’m Talking About

Mark Halperin has the goods (PDF) on Senator Obama’s scathing 40 page rebuttal to Jerome Corsi’s trash. I love the shot at the “Bush/Cheney Attack Machine”, but what I’m even happier about is the AP writeup on the story. Check out this fact-check from the AP:

Jerome Corsi’s anti-Obama book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president. The book is a compilation of all the innuendo and false rumors against Obama — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and secretly has a “black rage” hidden beneath the surface.

In fact, Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

[snip]

Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn’t used drugs since.

[snip]

He claims Obama received extensive Islamic religious education as a boy in Indonesia, education that was only offered to the truly faithful. Actually, Obama is a Christian and as a boy he attended both Catholic school and Indonesian public schools where some basic study of the Koran was offered.

He accuses Obama of wanting to weaken the military even though Obama’s campaign calls for adding 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines.

The AP also takes on Corsi’s own dubious past, including his bigoted statements against Catholics. This writeup is arguably as important as Obama’s response, because even if the facts in the Obama rebuttal are true (and they are), it’s important that media outlets get the word out as well.

McCain Camp Repeats Landstuhl Lies *Again*

This is really unbelievable. After getting excoriated in the Washington Post among other places for his lies on the Landstuhl story, they are going to this discredited well once more.

Politico:

Yesterday, after a wave of criticism from the press, McCain’s camp seemed to abandon the oft-repeated claim that Obama had abandoned a trip to visit troops because he couldn’t bring cameras.

“It does now seem that Barack Obama snubbed the troops for reasons other than a lack of photo-op potential,” wrote deputy communications director Michael Goldfarb.

Bu that doesn’t seem to have stopped them from repeating it today.

“Last week, Senator Obama skipped a visit with wounded U.S. troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany because the Pentagon would not allow campaign staff or media to accompany him into the hospital,” reads a statement from a former Landstuhl surgeon, Col. Danny Jazarevic, and circulated by McCain’s camp.

This is truly unbelievable. It’s clear that the McCain camp has no moral compass whatsoever. Even after getting blasted on his stupid ‘celebrity ad’ McCain maintains that he is now proud of the ad. This calls for a more hard-hitting ad. Terms that could be used include “liar” and “bald-faced liar.” McCain has no scruples or morals whatsoever.