Spin Cycle

Why would you expect anyone to be genuine?

One day after Wesley Clark says that having your plane shot down over Hanoi doesn't exactly qualify as foreign policy experience, Obama takes issue with him in a speech and the campaign says he "rejects" Clark's statement.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers' response: "Of course Barack Obama has called many times for a new kind of politics, but his campaign just hasn't lived up to it. We've learned we need to wait and see what Senator Obama actually does, rather than take him at his word."

But he just did live up to it, didn't he, Brian? Didn't we just see what he actually does?

The whole exchange is particularly ironic for two reasons:

First, in a conference call this morning, the McCain campaign used Col. Bud Day (left) -- who was one of the principals in the false 2004 Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, that McCain himself condemned -- to feign outrage at Clark's remarks. Is that McCain's maverick version of the new kind of politics? Recruit people with purely partisan credibility who have proven ties to discredited "old politics" attacks?

And second: Although McCain has made it clear that he is not above milking his POW experience, how exactly is riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down a qualification to be president?

Or, is feigned outrage supposed to be a substitute for an answer?