Answering questions.

As a part of their "Barack Obama isn't like us" strategy, the McCain campaign has been saying that he hasn't been properly forthright about his associations. As Gov. Palin said recently on the Laura Ingraham show,

Laura, it’s so important for your listeners to start asking those questions and demanding answers of candidates. We certainly — John McCain and I — our lives are an open book. We’re called on the carpet every day, demanded of us to answer questions and I don’t see that on the other side. I don’t see the other ticket being asked to be truthful and give these details that American voters are deserving and your listeners have gotta have these questions too.

This from the woman who has been shielded from all sorts of media? Who has yet to have a press conference? Who has taken open questions from the press just once, and for 15 minutes? Open book?

Again, I realize why they are doing it: they are trying to paint Obama as shady and unknown and suspicious--a person who is unwilling to talk about his background, trying to hide things about his past. You have folks like Frank Keating, Obama campaign co-chair, calling Obama a "man of the street," urging him to come out about his youth drug use. This is particularly amusing because the only reason we know about said drug use is because Obama himself wrote about it in his book!

So, I know why this is going on, but I suspect that at some point people will tire of attacks, especially hypocritical (Palin) or self-evidently incorrect and more than a little racially tinged (Keating) ones. But I have been disappointed before at our collective incapacity to detect complete and utter crap.