Well done. The Obama camp should send out a release directing folks to this page.

The McCain Camp doesn't let the truth get in the way of a good smear ad. And the MSM will not do their job and call him on it to try and keep campaigns honest. Sure blog sites and factcheck.org will dissect it and expose it for the utter crap that it is, but the MSM will probably air it in full in a continuous loop, free of charge.

Who exactly has been in control for the past eight years while Iran greatly expanded its influence within the Middle East from Lebanon to Iraq?

They won't call McCain on this crap because, you guessed it, he is a POW.

Great opportunity for an ad by Obama showing what a P.O.S. McCain's group is.

The response should be "John McCain wants to start World War III."

McCain: "Simply dangerous"

It is this lie and others by Republicans, designed to scare people that also has another effect. The fear from these ads translates into anger and that anger can translate into violence for those that are 'less evolved'.
McCain and his crew should know this, but they like most Republicans seem hell bent on creating this divide at any cost.
This is a dangerous ad.

Again, they lie, we respond to it substantively, but their attacks work.

The only real way to fight back is to launch fresh attacks ourselves.

http://strategy08.wordpress.com

I am a little worried that the Obama campaign is working so hard on the convention story arc that they are going to miss this. A lie unopposed is the truth.

By the way a lot of McCain ads contain the argument that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes. Unless you make more that $250,000 Obama is going to lower your taxes. But the McCain lie has gone unopposed so long people are beginning to believe it. Wolf Blitzer of the Corportate Nitwit Network went so far as to do an entire misleading story "proving" that McCain is right. I saw Kudlow make the same argument.

The Obama campaign has got to get off its couch and take on these lies before they are ingrained as truth.

The larger context of this ad is its ominous and dark tone that is the politics of insecurity in its pure form. This is aimed at the Republican base and a distraction from issues like immigration and global warming. Fear is the base emotion of Republicans and optimism is the base emotion of Democrats. Reagan got conservative Democrats to switch by combing the two.

That is why Democratic surrogates have to evoke the fear of Four More Wars while Obama embodies the optimism that even many Republicans are looking for.

This actually plays a bit into Obama's wheelhouse. He talks about the polictics of fear pretty effectively and I'm assuming that will be a big part of his speech on Thurs.

http://pufferfish.typepad.com/

This election is about the past vs. the future. And our hope is to get that across to the youth and turn them out to vote in great numbers. Maybe that's why Obama can't go too negative. He can't ruin the brand or the youth will turn off.

What Obama can do is point to the dishonesty of this ad and the others, and say "same ole thing" we can't believe anything the GOP says. They take the facts and turn them into what they want it to be, just as they did with the WMD in Iraq. The Republicans have no credence left with the American people.

I also feel we need to start associating McCain with Cheney. An old angry man who wants to wage war on the world.

This is a gift if used properly. It gives Obama a clear chance to out McCain for being a liar, knocking down that straight talk BS.

A response ad could have a clip of the McCain ad distortion, a clip of what Obama actually said, and some quip at the end about how McCain's ambition caused him to abandon all straight talk.

By putting the McCain lie and Obama quote side by side, the Obama camp can show what kind of man McCain is and what tactics he's willing to resort to. Forget relying upon the MSM to expose lies. Take it directly to the people.

An appropriate response would be the daisy ad.

Obama needs to go on the OFFENSIVE. Plain and simple. Reacting all the time looks weak.

McCain: Dishonesty First

Obama can't come out strong now because he doesn't want to take focus off the convention. he'll simply have a press release highlighting basically what Greg said and that's about it.

When people talk about Barack needing to be more aggressive with McCain they don't mean yell and scream at him. The magic of Bill Clinton was that during the campaign he controlled the message. He was always coming up with a way to attack his opponents record or statements in a way that forced them to respond. At some point by now he would have said to a reporter something like.

"I just don't understand how McCain can say he wants to keep US troops in Iraq for 100 years. You would think that someone with as much foreign policy experience would know better than that."

He would say it without an ounce of contempt but with only a smile on his face as if he really didn't understand the position. That would simply force the reporter to stick a microphone in McCain's face and ask him to respond to the comment. The next day or later that week while McCain is trying to respond to this he would say something else.

Barack needs to start controlling the news cycle better. Yes he's a good counter puncher but he needs to deliver the blows better. By and large American doesn't vote on the issues. Democrats have always gone into elections with the popular stance on the issues and largely gotten their butts kicked. America votes on the guy who is in control and wins the fight. If Barack wants America to start seeing him as a leader then he needs to take control.

There's something interesting that most everyone is missing here. Billyboy27 already pointed out that Rove left the worst sliming to 527's whereas Team McGoo is doing it itself, in its own name.

That's important because its part of the utter crudity, the complete lack of artfulness of this attack.
When Rove and his totally independent obscenely wealthy Texas sty-mates slimed, the lies they told were never capable of being proven absolutely objectively false. They were always either ugly unwarranted inferences based upon at least a thin layer of fact or else lies about things that were alleged to have happened in the pre-Youtube past, lies like the Swift Boat smear that would inevitably get played as a "he said, but he said."

McCain is here, himself, telling a flat out, easily verifiable, demonstrable lie. This isn't a "if you follow a tangled pattern of facts, you must conclude that McCain is not being entirely honest" lie. This is a "here's what McCain says Obama said, and here's what he actually said, on tape." It's a made for Meet the Press moment. By pimping this one to his pals in the MSM, he's openly inviting a monumental reaming at about the worst time possible for him.

I can really come up with a few possible explanations for why they'd be doing this.

a) McCain's unhinged temper has so infected his team that they're just recklessly charging into the machine guns heedless of consequences.

b) They are so sublimely confident that the media will swoon, fluff and boozily swing in the tire swing that they truly think they can just say any goddamned thing they want and get away with it.

c)They are deliberately probing to find the outer limits of what they can, in fact, get away with saying. They have yet to have hit a limit and they really want to know where it is, so they're going extreme in an effort to find out.

d) They're just plain desperate. Maybe they felt like they need to pull ahead of him before Labor Day to have a chance of beating the huge ground game Obama's been building while we fretted, they've thrown everything they've got at him and all they've managed to do is move their ceiling up a couple of points, so now they're in "what the fuck," mode in a last ditch effort to either break through or go down in flames before they have to abide by spending limits.

"c)" Is the one that worries me a bit. If the MSM doesn't thoroughly light his ass up over this one, Team McGoo will (rightly) conclude that there are no limits on what they can say.

time to start just calling them press releases on video....

Off the subject, but this is from Fox News:

MINNEAPOLIS — Delegates to the Republican National Convention who are traveling into downtown St. Paul next week will be treated to a billboard-sized welcome from the other party.

The Democratic National Committee bought billboard space to display a picture of John McCain embracing President Bush with the message, “Does this look like change to you?”

“We’re going to spend every day looking for every opportunity to remind voters in the Twin Cities and across the country that a vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush and his failed policies,” said Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the DNC.

That will include not just the billboard but posters on several bus stops that serve the Xcel Center in St. Paul.

Joanna Burgos, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Convention, didn’t return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The Democrats also plan to distribute to reporters a multimedia press kit, which will include flash drives with an extensive catalog of McCain’s record — histories of his votes, past statements and other material the Democrats want to highlight.

A team of two dozen Democratic fact checkers will be sending out rapid responses to every GOP speaker.

In addition to the visual and multimedia cues, Democrats will hold daily press briefings in downtown St. Paul to counter the Republican message radiating from the Xcel Center. They’re setting up a media center just across the street.

That’s become standard procedure at the national political conventions. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is among those Republicans touting the McCain message this week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

LaVera wouldn’t hint at which Democrats would be tapped for the St. Paul patrol, but said there would be numerous national party figures.

They’ll be joined at the daily press conferences by Minnesota Democratic leaders, as well as people LaVera described as “Minnesota voters” who will talk about the impact of McCain’s policies.

Jet, of course it is. Be afraid of Obama he said "this" and he is Black, I'm John McCain and I'm white.

I hate lies, and the lying liars that tell them.

Does McCain have some mistaken belief that the American people are supportive of a war with Iran? I think this ad just makes McCain look like he wants another war...even the most conservative are worried about the possibility of a war with Iran. McCain is listening to Lieberman too much. This is a negative for McCain.

When you've been in a war for five years and you still can't explain to the country why, you might not want to run scary ads about another country you want to go to war with. It just doesn't sell. The country is tired of war, and tired of going into debt for war.

McCain is so out of it he thinks the country supports him on this. He might want to quit talking to WWII veterans and start talking to the people more.

MSM won't do anything, and even if they, did no one would know because too few watch and listen to the kind of pundits who would correct this kind of thing, and hit it over the head, again and again.

No, Obama needs to prepare a coordinated counter-attack to this kind of lie and smear, because this is just the beginning. And Obama's response should be the same message to every one of these zingers. His surrogates need to start the meme, too

John McCain can NO LONGER be trusted. He's now a power-hungry, dirty, and say-anything politician.

Quick nod to his service (undercutting McCain's knee-jerk response) and then say how some in Washington get comfortable with distortions, half-truths, and inaction. I'd flash pictures of Vicki Iseman and Charles Keating lobbyists, headlines about Keating Five, lobbyists ties. I'd show how he has said he belongs to two different religions. Other flip flops. I'd cite his Senate absenteeism and voting ties to Bush. Then, I'd end with a montage of Bush, Cheney, etc. and the words "America has seen this movie before." Cut out with a voice over of Nixon's "Well, I'm not a crook."

Anyone else think that McCain kind of, sort of, reminds them of Nixon? That's right. And the American people, those that don't bother with details, will get that stuck in their brain, too.

The gloves need to come off, folks. These are jabs coming from the right at this moment. If Obama doesn’t defend himself, they will pummel him into a razor-tight election that could go either way.

Latest Gallup Daily Tracking, 8-27: Obama 45, McCain 44.

"....McCain, dangerously insane to be president."

I'm Barack Obama and I approved THIS message!

Let the McCain camp spend their money on this trash-voters will see through it all. At the rate they are going with all of these ads that are not doing much of anything to help him, he will soon be out of money.

When I tell friends how disenchanted I am with the do-nothing, say-little Obama campaign they tell me how dangerous a McCain presidency would be (particularly in foreign affairs). And it always works on me. So why isn't the Obama camp hitting this theme daily about McCain and his senile warmongering and dangerous puppetmasters? Am I the only one who fears more McCain wars? Didn't Obama campaign that he would bring a gun to a knife-fight? Does he even have a pea-shooter?

Everything is not a smear. Distorting actual words to make a political point that fits your narrative isn't exactly the exclusive domain of McCain's camp either, or have we forgotten the "100 years" dust-up earlier. He needs to hit back, yes, but whining about smears and distortions is not necessarily a game that BO can win. The Rovians are simply better at it.

They hit the nail on the head....

http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/08/mccain-too-reck.html#more

Oh, McCain. Seriously?

The McCain Camp has been pulling a fast one on the MSM, and only now are they catching on - these are not ads but rather video press releases. If this was released in print form, it wouldn't get any coverage, but release it as a fake ad and it's all over the news.

Another fallacy is that the McCain Camp has to burn through all it's primary money by the time he accepts the GOP nomination. Once he accepts he simply donates any primary cash on hand to the RNC - which means the RNC can just use it to run ads against Obama. At least this is my understanding of the situation.

If McCain is going to take Obama's remarks grossly out of context, please, please, please somebody make an ad with his recent comment to Yahoo! where he says "I am an illiterate." Sure he was talking about computers, but out of context...

This is absurd and absolutely ridiculous...

Does John McP.O.Dubya want to go to war with the whole world? Is he going to send Cindy to Iran to see if they have nukes when she's done in Georgia where she don't belong.

The MSM better get all over this and point out these distortions well lies.

Johnny McWar MUST BE STOPPED!!!!