McCain's Desperation Continues To Escalate

It's 29 days until the election, and McCain's campaign is flailing. They are down sharply in the polls, they lost the first two debates, and the economy continues to be front page news. Over the weekend, the McCain campaign announced that they wanted to "turn the page" from the economic crisis and start smearing Obama instead.

Indeed, Sarah Palin said that Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and today McCain basically accused Obama of being a liar and a fraud. Palin's remarks were despicable, and of course totally untrue:



Sarah Palin has also brought up Rev. Wright, in a NY Times column that could come back to haunt her:

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

If anyone should know to keep their mouth shut about pastor problems, it's Sarah Palin. Just a few weeks ago, the Wasilla Bible Church hosted a sermon by David Brickner, of the anti-semitic group Jews for Jesus. Sarah Palin was in the audience and did not leave, despite these comments by Brickner:

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."

Sarah Palin was also in church a few years back, when her pastor basically said that the world would be a better place if Christians, rather than Jews, controlled the economy. Obama, meanwhile, was not in the pews during Rev. Wright's controversial moments.

The Obama campaign, having learned the key lessons of 1988, 1992, 2000 and especially 2004, have not hesitated to strike back on all of these fronts. First of all, they have set up a website called KeatingEconomics.com, that explores John McCain's shameful role in the Keating Five scandal. The site includes a 13-minute documentary laying out the case against John McCain, and explaining how he has failed to learn the lessons of the Savings & Loan crisis.

It's actually laughable that McCain is today accusing Obama of being responsible for the mortgage meltdown, when in fact McCain has been there from the very beginning. Obama didn't even get to Washington until 2004, when the housing bubble was in full bloom. You can't even blame Democrats in general for the crisis, since housing prices ballooned during the years of Republican control and began to burst before Democrats took Congress.



In other words, blaming Obama for the current meltdown is the same as blaming Obama for high gas prices. It's ridiculous. It's the kind of argument a Washington outsider would make against a longtime insider like John McCain. But for John McCain to make it to a freshman Senator? Again -- ridiculous.

John McCain is revealing his character during this campaign. Angry, vindictive, reckless, erratic, willing to do or say anything to win. He'd have a tough time winning no matter what he did, given that he has voted 90% of the time with the worst president in history. But by picking a national joke like Sarah Palin as his VP, and by resorting to these sorts of discredited smear attacks, he has really trimmed his chances. At this point he needs an epic comeback to win, which would probably include either a meltdown by Obama or an assist from Al Qaeda.

No matter what happens on Nov. 4th, it's pretty clear that McCain's reputation is in the trash can.