James Kirchick’s piece on Politico today noted the seemingly coordinated criticism of McCain’s military record by Obama supporters or surrogates: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11463.html

I can’t believe that this is, as Kirchick suggests, something being done at the behest of the campaign. Why on earth would Obama, leading in every poll, change the message of the campaign to personal attacks which just happen to highlight McCain’s greatest strength? Which leads me to my next question, what the hell is going on here? Is there any explaining this, or is this just an unfortunate coincidence? I would expect the McCain camp to try and keep this going for as long as possible.

In other news, the energy crisis has started to emerge, along with the economy and the war, as the big issue of the campaign. Unfortunately there are no easy answers. McCain wants to drill more, but, as the Dems point out, the oil companies haven’t even drilled on what they have yet and it takes an awfully long time to dig wells and start extraction. Obama wants to impose a ‘windfall profits’ tax. Nevermind that the whole scheme of windfall profits is essentially to treat society’s most productive members as criminals, the tax would just be passed along to consumers anyway. Nuclear energy is an option the candidates seem to agree on, Obama’s position is still unclear, but Nuclear plants don’t spring up over night and nobody wants the waste dumped in their state.

I hear they have oil in Iraq, exploitive imperialism anyone? Yes, I am kidding.