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Monday, Oct 6, 2008 1:45 PM UTC

New McCain ad calls Obama “dishonorable”

As the campaign gets even more personal, the McCain campaign releases an ad falsely implying Obama slandered U.S. troops, and saying the Democrats are "too risky for America."

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Topics: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, War Room, John McCain, R-Ariz.,

We’re now less than a month away from Election Day, and the race to the bottom has begun in earnest, on both sides. The latest ad out of John McCain’s campaign is pretty clearly part of that race.

Dubbed “Dangerous,” the spot — which the McCain camp says is running nationally — takes an ill-considered remark by Barack Obama out of context to imply that he slandered U.S. troops.

“Who is Barack Obama?” the narrator asks. “He says our troops in Afghanistan are ‘just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ How dishonorable.”

The ad then goes on to attack Congressional liberals (a necessity, as the ad was paid for in part by the Republican National Committee) for some votes on the Iraq war before the narrator concludes, “Obama and Congressional liberals. Too risky for America.”

Over at The Stump, one of The New Republic’s blogs, Michael Crowley made a good point about Sarah Palin making this same attack against Obama’s comments about Afghanistan, writing:

It’s an incredibly cynical line of attack, particularly when Palin (hilariously) claims this “disqualifies” Obama from being commander in chief. (Of course what Obama meant was that an overreliance on air strikes — due in part to a shortage of ground troops — is causing a tragic and strategically counterproductive level of civilian casualties.)

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman.

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