Spin Cycle

So, as personal attacks begin to completely take over the campaign, McCain releases a new ad attacking Obama as "dangerous."

It has two misleading elements. One is the old McCain canard that Obama voted against funding troops. The facts: McCain also opposed troop funding, during a 2007 legislative struggle over a timetable on Iraq. Obama opposed a funding bill without a timetable, McCain opposed a funding bill with a timetable, and neither man actually opposed giving the troops all the funding they needed.

The other is based on a quote from Obama in 2007 when he was calling for more troops in Afghanistan: "We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there."

McCain pretends that was some horrible slur on the troops -- as opposed to the White House strategy. An AP fact check at the time found, however, that Obama was correct -- as of August, 2007, militants had caused 231 civilian casualties in attacks, while Western forces had caused 286 collateral casualties. The clip notes that even George Bush, in a meeting with Hamid Karzai, acknowledged that civilian casualties were too high.

Here's the ad: