Senator Honorable in the Sewer
Posted by Joe Klein

Back in 2000, in South Carolina, the robocalls--and calls to local right-wing talk radio shows--were about John McCain's "interracial child" and Cindy McCain's drug addiction. They were a craven, disgusting tactic by the George W. Bush campaign. McCain was, rightly, outraged by them.

Now McCain's campaign is making robocalls distorting Barack Obama's non-existent relationship with Bill Ayers:

The call begins: "Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC," before telling recipients that they "need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans."

Now this isn't quite the spew that McCain suffered in South Carolina, but hey, he's got three more weeks to descend to that. Certainly, such calls are not the sort of activity normally attributed to "a man whose courage has never been questioned," as McCain described himself last week. Real men don't hide behind robocalls. It is nowhere near honorable.

But, my friends, I give you John McCain, 2008 edition--John McCain for the history books.

Update: Greg Sargent has all the skeevy robocalls...so far at TPM.