McCain Needs Better Defenders

One of McCain's supporters makes an embarrassing series of assertions in defense of John McCain:

But former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who supports McCain, called Obama's comments "a very sophisticated injection of race."

"It was sort of like a political prophylactic," Blackwell said. "[Obama] was anticipating, you know, that race will be an issue, although John McCain has worked very, very diligently to make sure that race is not the issue.

So you see? Obama was working too hard to try to prevent race from becoming an issue. So as part of his diligent effort to make sure that race is not an issue, McCain had to make race an issue.

"We'll let the chips fall where they may when it comes to how people perceive this, but we are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who's fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, to be able to be painted as racist."

Right... McCain has a long history devoted to equal rights for people who didn't want to celebrate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday. And equal rights for those who want to fly the Confederate Battle Flag. Besides, if that's not what you mean by "equal rights", he's flip-flopped so that doesn't count any more. Also, he supports, er, used to support but now opposes affirmative action, but either way he was supporting "equal rights". Equal rights for gay people? No, wait, don't bring that into a discussion of race....

We didn't draw first blood. I mean, this campaign has been rough and tumble since the day Barack Obama got his nomination, and we've withered under the attacks of the Obama campaign on a daily basis.

Ooh... You can almost picture McCain, dressed up as Rambo, slurring out, "He drew first blood."

Would these be the "attacks" where McCain has been accused of supporting the Bush Administration policies that he... supports? The reciprocal misrepresentation of the meaning of Senate votes on multi-issue bills? I'll grant that I bypass most commercial television, and thus rarely see the attack ads, but what did I overlook?

Meanwhile, McCain doesn't seem much better at defending his gutter tactics. He is "proud of" an attack ad that compares Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Is he similarly proud of the lies in his ad about Obama's cancelled visit with injured troops in Germany? Are we to believe that it is a coincidence that his "race card" claims were released at a time when there was growing media attention being paid to those lies - and the fact that he had another attack ad scripted and ready to go if Obama had visited the troops?

Is the worst part that the media continues to follow the campaign at the surface level, that it drops the ball on real stories to pick up the latest campaign fluff, that McCain seems to have obtained a bounce in the polls through his gutter tactics, or that this could be the point where the campaign gets truly dirty on both sides?