With the economy in the tanks and McCain’s poll numbers sagging because most Americans blame Republican policies for the current downturn, it appears the McCain campaign is planning to go even more negative than they already have.  While a desperate strategy of change-the-subject and attack with non-issues is no surprise, what is a little encouraging is that the Obama campaign is not simply sitting back and taking it but are already fighting back.  They’re bringing up the Keating Five scandal from the 1980s and 90s that cost American taxpayers nearly $3 billion (part of the $124 billion Savings and Loan debacle), and they’re making sure we know McCain was at the center of it all.

Obama for America has produced and released online a short documentary about the whole affair.  Check it out:

UPDATE: In yet another excellent post Glenn Greenwald recounts how Sean Hannity had Andy Martin, who in the 1980s and 90s filed unnumerable lawsuits that “were routinely filled with the most extreme anti-Semitic venom one could find anywhere this side of Mein Kampf,” on his Fox News Sunday show Hannity’s America.  But of course Hannity had nothing to say of the dark side of this so-called “internet journalist,” and instead gave him a national stage to attack Barack Obama’s past as a community organizer, claiming that during this time the presidential candidate was actually “training for a radical overthrow of the government,” and that if Obama becomes president, America is “basically going to be … in the throes of a socialist revolution, which attempts to essentially freeze out anybody who’s not part of this radical ideology.”

Setting aside the absurd notion that the increasingly centrist Obama is secretly planning to bring about a red dictatorship, Greenwald points out that the Obama campaign didn’t simply fall over and take it.  Instead, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs “mauled Sean Hannity” on Hannity & Colmes following the second presidential debate “by taking [Fox News'] deceitful standards and … applying it to Fox and their ‘journalists.’”  Watch the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Election 2008, John McCain, Keating five

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