Kitchen Sink Employed In Last-Minute Smear Strategy

This is the final primal scream for John McCain and the right. After decades of feeling entitled to the levers of power, of shrugging off responsibility and accountability, they are having to deal with the consequences of the failed policies of the conservative era. So as a result, they are going heavily on the attack.

There are the new set of nasty robocalls, now being employed in McCain's home state of Arizona, where multiple polls have now shown the race to be close and where Obama is mounting a last-minute surge.

There's the latest deliberate misinterpretation of Obama's tax policies, pretending not to understand that "over $250,000 gets an increase" and "under $200,000 gets a cut" can both be right at the same time.

Obama has said throughout the campaign that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see a tax increase. Those making less than $200,000 will get a tax cut, he says. "If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year, you will not see a single dime of your taxes go up," Obama said during an October 7 presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee. "If you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down."

The campaign ad McCain refers to, titled "Defining Moment," does have a graphic appear on the screen that says, "Families making less than $200,000 get tax cut." Obama says, "If you have a job, pay taxes and make less than $200,000 a year, you'll get a tax cut," which is, again, consistent with the plan he has
laid out.

Biden was speaking Monday, October 27, in an interview with WNEP in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He said, "(An) $87 billion tax break doesn't need to go to people making an average of $1.4 million. It should go like it used to. It should go to middle class people — people making under $150,000 a year." Biden never says that tax breaks should "only" go to such people. The Obama campaign says he was merely using that figure as an example and that the statement does not represent a change in policy.

The Verdict: False. What McCain is doing here, in part, is comparing apples and oranges. He compares two different aspects of Obama's tax plan as if they were the same. And Biden never said people making less than $150,000 are the "only" people who would get a tax cut under Obama's policies.

There's the latest attack ads basically calling Obama a Marxist-Leninist committed to handing out "welfare," one of which is so rushed that it includes a misspelling and the other clearly spelling out the word "blacks" to answer the question, I assume, of where the money goes.

There's this latest crusade against the media, attacking the LA Times for publishing a story friendly to him several months ago that he apparently just noticed. And by the way, the attacks on Rashid Khalidi are ridiculous, especially considering that McCain and Khalidi have worked together:

Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.

And of course, at the end of the campaign we are getting the full Jeremiah.

The National Republican Trust PAC, which has been airing an ad attacking Barack Obama's association with Reverend Wright in three battleground states, has now put down for a national buy on five networks that will last from now through election day, a consultant with the group confirms to me.

The ad will run nationally on Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC for the next five days, the consultant, Rick Wilson, says -- "all the way until election day."

The ad, which you can watch here, features the now-infamous footage of Wright's livelier sermons, and intones that Obama "never complained" about Wright "until he ran for President," adding that Obama is "too radical, too risky."

The Democratic Web presence has done a good job smacking down and ferreting out these attacks, but it seems like lately there are almost too many to chronicle. The conservative attack machine still has a pulse and they're still going to try and smear Barack Obama. We'll see if it works.