Do as I say, not as I do

Victor Davis Hanson at NRO:

Once again we see the Obama Rules in action: Obama as Zeus on Olympus decries the petty mean politics of mere mortals that the McCain campaign is using against him: "In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over. We've seen it before and we're seeing it again — ugly phone calls, misleading mail, misleading TV ads, careless, outrageous comments."

Meanwhile, Obama has raised and spent the largest amount of money on ads—and negative ads— in election history, and remained silent about the NY Times running an 11th-hour hit piece on his opponent's wife, or a Rep. Lewis comparing McCain to George Wallace—or a Sen. Kerry now suggesting that John McCain (which Team Obama characterized as "losing his bearings", and "confused", etc) uses adult diapers.

So the same old, same old modus operandi: all sorts of surrogates in the Congress and press offer some pretty mean-spirited "outrageous comments", while St. Obama does his part to complain that McCain himself is doing exactly what his own supporters are in fact doing.

Call it Nixonian deniability of culpability, or call it Teflonesque or creating the necessary firewall—but it finally becomes as creepy as it is predictable, and I think all the voters cannot be fooled all the time.