mccain's dirty campaigners

"straight talkin'" john mccain has a history of hiring real dirty tricksters for his 2008 campaign and brushing it off. in march 2000, mark mckinnon's maverick media team ran an ad for the Bush campaign charging mccain with being against breast cancer research -- an ad which then-mcmain spokeswoman nancy ives said showed "the Bush campaign trying to distort John McCain's record. . . . this is a desperate tactic that the voters of New York simply won't stand for" (quoted in the boston globe, march 2).

the firm stevens reed curcio & potholm created the swift boat veterans for truth campaign against john kerry in august 2004. "I deplore this kind of politics," McCain said. "I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable." (quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 6). finally, mccain hired as his campaign manager terry nelson, the man responsible for the ad run in the 2006 tennessee senate race that was widely perceived to be playing into stereotypes of black male promiscuity directed towards white women.

mccain's response to george stephanopoulos on the february 4 edition of ABC's "this week" was:

these are good people who were doing as they were instructed. They are people who shape the message, don't dictate it. But the second thing is, most of them are good people. They are all good people, otherwise I wouldn't hire them. And they have done a good job in the campaigns they've been -- myriad of campaigns they've been involved in.

the latest "good people" mccain has hired, as david corn of the nation has reported, is fred malek, who "counted jews for nixon."