Steve Schmidt Orders His Own Personal Wahhhmbulance

This has to be the most pathetic conference call in the history of conference calls.

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

The best part of this is the response comment from McCain HQ: "You are in the tank." Because if you don't give McCain's team the final cut on all your stories you might as well have written "Yes We Can" 1,000 times. Joe Klein 2.0 comments on this and tells the truth:

1. he's hoping to work the refs: if he complains enough about press bias, we mainstream sorts will cower, cringe and try to seek false equivalences between the two campaigns.

2. the more time we spend covering this nonsense, the less we'll spend on the real issues in this campaign.

Sorry, Steve. Not buying.

Well, mostly not buying. Ruth Marcus is down for a ride on the tire swing. But the WaPo editorial page is pretty pissed off, which is unusual.

Just calling a press conference to say "Stop calling me a liar!" instead of "I'll stop lying" is pathetic in and of itself. But it's even more so on a day when the McCain campaign releases their Obama's a straight-up Chi-town street hustler ad, and then asks for leniency from the press. Win or lose, they are really terrible human beings.