You've Got a Mote in Your Eye, Senator

One of the key strategies in the Karl Rove playbook is that you attack your opponent based on your own shortcomings, projecting the negative onto the opposition. That's the logic, for a single example, behind draft-dodgers attacking the military service of decorated war veterans.

So it's no surprise that McCain would try and use that strategy. But as with so much else, the old guy just doesn't get it. It's one thing to attack your opponent for missing a vote you deem critical, but to do so when you yourself missed the same vote is not only disingenuous, it's stupid. To state unequivocally that you voted on the issue when you did not is a flat out lie. And one which spilled so easy from McCain's lips.

From CNN's Political Ticker:

In a statement criticizing Obama’s positions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the organization claiming credit for the missile launches, McCain wrote, “This is the same organization that I voted to condemn as a terrorist organization when an amendment was on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Obama refused to vote.”

The problem with the critique? McCain also missed that vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment on September 26, 2007. Records show that Obama was in New Hampshire and McCain was in New York instead of being in the Senate chamber for the vote in question.

And, just for the record, if Obama had indeed voted for that amendment (as did Hillary Clinton), I would have had substantially more difficulty in throwing my support behind the man. The fact that he did not (I'd prefer if it had been with a "No" vote rather than absence, but still) support a back-door to war with Iran (which for all intents and purposes would have wrapped up such military action into the AUMF that got us into Iraq), has served him in good stead.

And John McCain is still a compulsive liar. That's some straight talk for ya.