Fuck You, RNC

Please forgive the light blogging these past few days (I'm feeling a bit under the weather) but I had to get something off my chest before I hit the sack.

Has the Republican National Committee gone fucking nuts?

"As a legal matter,'' RNC chairman Mike Duncan said today, this is a "maliciously false'' campaign ad. "The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously'' quotes Sen. McCain as saying that extending the war in Iraq for 100 years would be fine with him, and places it in a context of images of combat. "Clearly this ad is just another attempt by the DNC to mischaracterize Sen. McCain's statements.''

As Mark Ambinder writes:

The RNC provided no evidence to support their charge that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad's content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The RNC's content charge is not black and white. The DNC wrote the ad carefully. Nowhere does the narrator or any chyron state that McCain is fine with the Iraqi war persisting for 100 years. The visuals -- explosions, bloodied troops -- take care of that association.

So what are they saying, that as long as the negative ads are geared towards Democrats, it's fine? Fuck you, RNC, McCain said it and the DNC has a right to use it. Whatever caveat McThuselah added after ("as long as Americans are not being injured... harmed or killed.... It's fine with me'') is all well and good, but how long before we get to that point? How many more deaths, American and Iraqi, will it take? I wonder what they'll say if a "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" ad comes out. Are they going to deny that McCain sang it?

Sure, take it out of context, it was just a joke, he was just pandering to the audience du jour, what's the big deal? I don't know about you, but I don't want ANYONE running for the Oval Office who "jokes" like that, or says something stupid about "obliterating" another country.