I'm hearing a great deal of complaints about John McCain's disavowal and disapproval of a North Carolina GOP ad that shows Jeremiah Wright's "God d*** America" sermon and hits two local Democrats for endorsing Barack Obama.
Does no one else see what's going on here?
How many other North Carolina Republican Party ads have you heard about this year? Last year? The year before that?
By criticizing the ad, McCain turned it into a national story, which means the ad is likely to be replayed on the cable networks and linked on YouTube and discussed on the talk shows and talk radio and written about in newspapers and magazines. This ad has 76,000 views on YouTube already, and it was posted online Tuesday.
And McCain gets to take the high road, saying he doesn't want to see negative campaigning done on his behalf.
He might as well say, "I want to win this campaign because I have better policies, not because my opponent associates with domestic terrorists who placed a bomb in a women's bathroom in the Pentagon. I want to win this campaign because I have better ideas, not because my opponent (as Karl Rove put it) "attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America." I want to win because voters believe I can solve the country's problems, not because my opponent's wife says she hasn't been proud of this country for the past twenty-five years."
UPDATE: Opening his show today, Rush Limbaugh approvingly touts the ad as "an offshoot of Operation Chaos."
Posted by: Mike 2008-04-24