McCain Palin Attacks Not the Same as Obama's

I'm tired of people lumping in Obama with McCain as a negative campaigner. It's just not true. For about a year, maybe more, there has been an underground smear campaign against Obama. What's happening now, is McCain, thanks largely to Palin, bought the wingnut strategy. In fact, safe to say, McCain doomed his candidacy when he chose Palin.

Salon: The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has an article today perfectly illustrating how the modern journalist’s conception of “balance” leads them to distort the truth. Balz’s article is about the increasing use of “character attacks” in the presidential race, and rather than state the truth — that the McCain/Palin ticket is now relying almost exclusively on some of the ugliest and most outright dangerous character smears seen in a modern presidential election — Balz instead pretends that this is a phenomenon of which both sides are guilty in equal measure:
At a time when the nation needs inspiration and confidence-building, the two candidates running for president are trying to ensure that whoever ends up winning next month will be seen as unfit by a sizable portion of the population.
To see the two candidates in a pair of appearances here in Ohio over the past two days is to see John McCain and Barack Obama attacking each other not just because of their different visions and prescriptions for the problems the country is now facing, but going straight at each other over character, fitness and behavior.
Has Balz bothered to watch the news for the last week? The rallies at John McCain and Sarah Palin’s events are rabid, drooling lynch mobs spouting the most vile and extreme accusations against Barack Obama personally that can be imagined. Here is what the AP report of the McCain/Palin event today in Ohio describes — now a regular, daily feature of their events:
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Saying that McCain has been ”erratic” over the past couple of months is plainly true and, even if it weren’t, it is a claim about McCain’s behavior as a leader, as a candidate, and his ability to lead the country. By obvious contrast —as Balz himself says — “McCain’s code is to suggest something sinister about Obama, to say there is something lurking in his past that Americans should fear.” Those accusations exist in different universes. Beyond that, 100% — 100% — of all McCain ads are now negative attacks on Obama, while only 1/3 of Obama ads entail negative attacks on McCain.
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