The time to expose these tactics for what they are is NOW

Josh Marshall says, don't be fooled by John McCain's "repudiation" of talk radio lunatic Bill Cunningham's bigoted introduction rant the other day. As we now know from Countdown, McCain knew damn well who this guy was, and the "good cop/bad cop" racist strategy of the erstwhile Straight Talk Express is already clear:

The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American,BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They're like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it's the score that's the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.

Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain's repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don't be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as 'channel conflict'. You've got your multiple distribution channels. You've got the way McCain's selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you've got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.

[snip]

If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he's done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we'll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.

Let's just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what's happening here and who's in charge.

Instead of taking the bait and virally marketing crap from Drudge, what we need to be doing RIGHT NOW is digging out and exposing the direct links between these so-called "surrogates" for the McCain campaign and the man himself. Why John McCain still has this reputation as being an honest broker is a mystery, but he does. I'm not saying we dig into everyone who ever served McCain a cup of coffee, but if he's going to lie and say he never met guys like Cunningham before, when it's clear he did and knew damn well what they stood for, as a means of trying to keep his hands clean, then those connections should be exposed.