Oh lordy, lordy, lordy, it's gotten craaaaaaaazy in here since I stopped in earlier and the top diary on the rec list was devoted to how we could attack John McCain by proving that he lifted a war story from a Solzhenitsyn book.
Now there are three recommended diaries devoted to this subject.
This, in my view, is a very bad sign. We are two and a half months from the election. It's clearly still close, maybe closer than it should be. There's a million ways in which the discussions here can contribute to winning: raising money, networking, media pushback, original reporting, and, yes, spreading talking points and information to attack McCain.
But this is not one of those million ways. This is useless, at best.
First, you can't prove anything. You can't.
Second, people will not tolerate you accusing McCain of lying about what happened to him when he was a POW, when you don't have proof, just logical inferences.
Third, it reminds people that he was a POW, and so what, even if he did make up a story, that's understandable, and Barack Obama doesn't even have a traumatic national hero experience to make up stories about, so who do you think you are, anyway?
I'm serious, it's really just that simple. This is an incredibly self-destructive line of attack. There is no reason to employ it. All of the energy that would go (is going!) into an ill-fated attempt to drag John McCain down by using his POW experiences against him (!!!) could and should go into raising money and promoting Obama events and so on and so on.
That the rec board is dominated by a discussion of this kind of pointless garbage is a bad sign. Our guy is running close. Every dollar matters. Every voter registration matters. Every substantive media error corrected matters. Every bit of space on the rec list matters.
The dirt cross does not matter.