Busted

Just a quick update to my Monday blog post. The New York Times and The Washington Post both ran feature stories today on the McSame ad, basically saying that everything in the ad is a lie. From WaPo:

The McCain campaign has produced a television commercial that says that while in Germany, Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." The commercial shows Obama shooting a basketball -- an event that happened earlier in the trip on a stopover in Kuwait, where the Democrat spoke to troops in a gym before grabbing a ball and taking a single shot. The military released the video footage.
A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama's decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him...
..."We got notice that [Gration] would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn't on the Senate staff," Obama said. "That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political, and the last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not, or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns."

It's nice to see the mainstream media actually reporting some facts. I'm honestly a bit surprised. These type of ads can be very effective, but only when the media decides to play along and not report the truth. See the 2004 Swiftboat ads for proof of this.

The McSame camp is now backing off and has admitted that the ad is false. Although, they do continue to cling to the smear that Obama in some way "snubbed" the troops. It should be interesting to see where they go from here. The republican camp seems pretty desperate.