By doing so, Mr. McCain is clearly trying to sow doubts about his younger opponent, and bring him down a peg or two. But some Republicans worry that by going negative so early, and initiating so many of the attacks himself rather than leaving them to others, Mr. McCain risks coming across as angry or partisan in a way that could turn off some independents who have been attracted by his calls for respectful campaigning.

George Will, the conservative whom the angel of honesty does not desert, proceeded to note while McCain this week was trying to salvage his reputation for honor by declaring to one of his more zealous followers (“he’s an Arab”) that Obama is “a family man” (as if those tricky Arabs are never that), his ads call Obama a “liar.” “The dissonance,” Will said, “is paralyzing.” Not exactly paralyzing, since McCain is fully ambulatory, but credit to Will for pointing a tentative finger at his side’s moral bankruptcy.

Paul Krugman stepped in to remind us that Republican savagery is not new, that the Republican base does not regard government by Democrats as “legitimate,” that they went after Clinton with charges of murder and drug smuggling (among others).

To which Cokie Roberts contributed this stupendous observation:

On both sides that’s true. You also have a huge number of Democrats who think that the Republicans are illegitimate and that was particularly true after the 2000 election. You really do have at the core of each party people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the election.

Democrats accepted the Bush election of 2004. In 2000, a Senate they controlled voted to accept the Electoral College returns as filtered through the fine ministrations of the Rehnquist court. In my view, they ought not to have done so. But they did. That’s not good enough for Ms. Roberts. She must have her moral equivalency. There’s a motto for our Sunday morning wisdom mongers: Moral Equivalency or Death.

As for Meet the Press, Brokaw did ask McCain surrogate Rob Portman about McCain’s “negative” campaign (as if negativity were intrinsically damnable, but that’s another story). Portman replied:

Senator Obama has run more negative ads in this campaign than any presidential campaign in history. Easily. And far more negative ads than Senator McCain has run, and including ads that directly take on Senator McCain on things like stem cell research in a, in a dishonest way, Social Security, immigration, that are, you know, by independent fact checkers have been found to be absolutely false.

Stem cells, Social Security, immigration―to criticize McCain on these, Portman thinks, amounts to personal attack. Contra Portman, Gov. Jon Corzine took issue with McCain’s deployment of “guilt by association” in his nonstop barrage against Barack Obama as putative buddy of Bill Ayers. Brokaw’s response? To ask Corzine about “John Lewis and guilt by association [in a speech] linking [McCain] with George Wallace?” But John Lewis was not accusing McCain of “palling around” with George Wallace. He was accusing McCain of acting like George Wallace―summoning the worst, most vicious, most racist angels of the American nature.

Once again, Brokaw’s round table was a liberal-free zone. He concluded with the idiotic prediction game, John McLaughlin’s gift to the game-show-as-phony-sophistication genre: “Do you expect an October surprise?” Readers, if you’re desperate to know who came out where, you’ll have to read the Meet the Press transcript. I won’t spoil the surprise.

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