Smearing Everything Except Her Lipstick

(CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday charged that Sen. John McCain’s campaign is launching “Swift boat-style attacks” on him instead of addressing the country’s problems.

“Sen. McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up,” Obama said at an event in Asheville, North Carolina.

“That’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time,” he said.

The comments come a day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, claimed that Obama associated “with terrorists who targeted our own country.”

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Biden Time

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama introduced Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as his running mate on Saturday, a choice that strengthens the Democratic ticket’s credentials on foreign policy heading into the general election against Senator John McCain.

In Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama selected a six-term senator best known for his expertise on foreign affairs — Mr. Biden spent last weekend in Georgia as that nation engaged in a tense confrontation with Russia — and his skills at political combat.

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#1 on the Worst-Smelling List

From The New York Times:

In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book attacking Senator John Kerry’s record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry’s war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

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