McCain Hypocrisy

So it turns out that McCain was planning to attack Obama if he visited the troops in Germany. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents — a lie.

Steve Benen plays "what if":

But imagine if it had gone the other way. Let’s say Obama had told the Pentagon to shove it, he showed up at Landstuhl, spent time with wounded U.S. troops, and the McCain campaign had launched its Plan B — condemning Obama for using the troops as campaign props.

It’s obviously just a guess, but my hunch is, the week would have unfolded the exact same way. The McCain campaign would have run its ad, the media would have picked up the “Obama exploits the troops” attack, and we would have had day after day of “debate” about whether Obama can be commander-in-chief if he recklessly blows off Pentagon rules in the midst of a campaign swing.

In other words, it didn’t matter which path Obama took — smear artists were prepared either way.