heads I win tails you lose

The media has began to take McCain to task for some of his nastier (or at least, more misleading) ads, such as the recent one which claimed that Obama refused to visit wounded soldiers because the TV cameras couldn't come along. As it turns out, that was a complete lie. But via Matthew Yglesias, Business Week's David Kiley notes that McCain's attack ad strategy was fact-proof:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

Hopefully this sort of attention will get results. The first commenter to Kiley's piece, "Anne," gives me hope (assuming this is actually a real person and not some sort of Democratic operative):

I really believed John McCain when he said he intended to run a civil campaign, that he intended to focus on the issues. I was a fool.

McCain is losing the one thing that distinguished him and provided him with an opportunity to defeat Obama: his integrity. Now that he's shrugged that off in favor of flailing around in the mud, the other characteristics that we were willing to overlook suddenly seem that much more difficult to ignore.