Lowest Common Denominator

by Eric Martin

Josh Marshall compiles the dossier for your viewing displeasure:

I love the bit where Cindy McCain proudly proclaims that her husband won't go negative, and would rather lose the election than go negative. How quaint in retrospect.

After watching this, I'm pretty comfortable with the level of outrage I showed in a prior post. Simply put, I'm disgusted. 

Comments

[Anarch]

IOKIYAR.

[cleek]

I'm pretty comfortable with the level of outrage I showed in a prior post.

i think you still have a ways to go before you're properly P.O.'d.

[AndyK]

According to both HuffPo and Talking Points, Cindy McCain now says that Obama is waging the dirtiest campaign in American history.

I'm not going to call any *person* involved psychotic, but does it seem excessive to characterize the McCain campaign that way?

[Anarch]

Anyone want to take bets as to whether she's hitting the dope again?

[Meditative_Zebra]

First off, why did the TPM video crew have to include the limbo song through the WHOLE D*MN VIDEO?

Secondly, I think that the video would have been a heck of a lot more effective if it had only been 30 to 60 seconds instead of four and a half minutes. There were only three real charges in there:

1) Obama is buddies with terrorists.
2) Obama wants to teach your kindergartners about sex.
3)Obama would chose to lose a war in order to win his campaign.

Those are three pretty ridiculous charges, but it doesn't help make your video more convincing or powerful by simply repeating it over and over again.

Criticisms of the video aside, I find it really amazing that there isn't more popular backlash to this kind of campaigning. I mean, these charges make the Swift Boat campaign in 2004 look substantive in comparison.

Personally, though, I find this quote from McCain incredibly wise and insightful. "Sooner of later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future."

If I were the Obama campaign I would be putting that clip in a video spot and putting it out anywhere McCain has aired these attack ads.

[Eric Martin]

I would add:

4) Obama hates America.

[Meditative_Zebra]

Well yeah, that and:

5) Obama will take all your monies.

Standard Republican boilerplate, really.

[russell]

From an Obama interview with Charlie Gibson:

"Why don't we just clear it up right now," Obama told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an exclusive interview for World News. "I'll repeat again what I've said many times. This is a guy who engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old. By the time I met him, 10 or 15 years ago, he was a college professor of education at the University of Illinois . . . And the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign, that he is an adviser of mine, that . . . I've 'palled around with a terrorist', all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points."

But wait, he's not done:

I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.

To which all I can add is, "If he has the stones".

Pwned.

Obama wasn't my first pick, but I'm liking him better and better. The man knows how to play without breaking a sweat.

h/t digby.

Thanks -