This news release from Camp Obama caught my eye in the Sun-Times, page 3:

WASHINGTON — Intensified attacks by Republican John McCain on the character of his Democratic opponent have coincided with Barack Obama losing a 9 percentage point advantage in a national poll, which showed the candidates running dead even over the weekend.

Republicans at it again, eh?

McCain, who had vowed to avoid the kind of negative tactics that were used against him in the 2000 Republican primary contest with George W. Bush, began attacking Obama during the Illinois senator’s trip to Iraq and Afghanistan late last month.

The rat!

In the course of the McCain offensive, Obama’s lead in a Gallup Poll tracking survey slid from 9 percentage points July 26, when he returned from overseas, to nothing by Saturday, when the poll showed the candidates tied at 44 percent.

What about the politics of civility?

The four-term Arizona senator, who backed the war and claims experience with security and foreign-policy issues, charged that Obama’s promise to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office amounted to his having chosen to lose a war to promote his run for the presidency.

That’s what he claims?  Experience?  From 26 years in House and Senate, debating and voting on national issues?  And so on and so forth?  Please.

Read the rest of this beautiful making of silk purse from sow’s ear, proof positive of David Axelrod’s ability to get around any problem, in this case a measly nine-point drop in polls.

Wait!  Reader’s mistake!  I get to the end of this marvelous story by Steven R. Hurst and see that hes not writing from Camp Obama but from the offices of the Associated Press, our venerable and venerated news service of long standing as a paragon of fairness and balance,

the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed. 

Soreeeeeeee!!!!!!  My fault!

Answer to conundrum even some smart people are annoying themselves with:

Ordinary Americans are smart enough to perceive that the elites are demanding that they vote for Obama to prove they’re not racists. But the voters don’t feel they have to prove any such thing, and they resent like hell the suggestion that they do have to prove it.

Explanation here for what Maureen Dowd takes as a sign of racism:

[O]nly 31 percent of white voters [tell] The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.

D., mainly concerned with diehard Hillary fan-feminists in her quite clever riff on Jane Austen, does get this one in about the color issue.  But she has no time for wondering about those 83% of blacks.  Could they be prejudiced?

Hey, if he knows what’s best, we’d be fools to ignore him:

In the video above Mary Katharine Ham humorously elaborates on the hectoring and devotional elements of the Obama campaign. Ms. Ham omits any reference to the warning Mrs. Obama provided in her admoniton to the Los Angeles disciples of Barack:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. . . . .

More evidence that O’s Euro trip gave more evidence of his not knowing much:

In Paris, he said that “terrorism cannot be solved by any one country alone,” and that we should establish partnerships. In Berlin, he expressed hope that Europeans and Americans “can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks” of terrorists worldwide.

But there’s one problem. We already have a counterterrorism partnership with the European Union. And it works. Indeed, despite news media caricatures of aggressive Americans feuding with pacifist Europeans, both groups are quite serious about protecting citizens by working together.

But he has a great smile and is young and fresh and will save us hopeless people from ourselves.