For a real alternative to Salon and most of the rest of the media's lockstep view, here's an excellent article by Frank Rich that just appeared today. Some excerpts:

"AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!"

Rich also includes such blasphemies as this:

It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169.

Rich then goes on to suggest that just maybe spending a little more time exposing the fictional nature of the completely invented moderate image of John McCain Saint Maverick might be more useful (or even actually the job of the commentariat) than all the concern trolling about why Obama can't win because he's A) black B) the list goes on, on beyond Zebra.

Check it out. Warning: May contain spoilers (click my sig, or copy link below)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17rich.html?ex=1376625600&en=c6f7e9ad1f06eb84&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

It turns out that McCain knew the questions ahead of time.

And Obama didn't.

That explains a lot.

So it may have been a better move than anyone thought, including Obama, since he couldn't have known in advance that McCain and the pastor would embarass themselves by lying.

McCain wasn't there the entire first part of when Obama was questioned, so he wasn't "in isolation" as the paster claimed during Obama's segment.

McCain's advisors heard the questions of course, but they promise that they didn't feed them to McCain before or when he arrived.

No, really, they crossed their hearts.

Will be interesting to see if anyone pays attention, especially here on the Island of Mindanao.

This may work against McCain in the end, it seems that the pastor lied about McCain being "in isolation", he wans't even there. So it turns out he likely knew the questions in advance, since all his advisors heard them before he even arrived.

Someone above wrote "The real winner is Rick Warren".

Yeah, uh, not so much perhaps when it comes out that he lied. Actually it already has, he just basically admitted it on CNN.

The point here really is that the pastor said, many times, "McCain is in isolation so he can't hear the questions".

It turns out that this was untrue.

So he lied to make McCain look good.

Then McCain, obviously loaded with the questions and canned answers (this was obvious before this little lie even was exposed, to anyone watching) gave a "better performance" than Obama, largely because he was right there with crisp, snappy answers, everyone said, and Obama seemed like "he had to think about them" as everyone also said.

Except now we know why.

Oh and yes, McCain's advisors I'm sure didn't tell McCain anything, as they just told CNN. They were there as Obama was questioned, but they weren't even listening! What a silly idea!

This is going to be good. Just for starters, consider that the following was just said:

McCain's advisors were watching their rival, the election front runner, in the first joint appearance-- and they didn't listen.

Right.

now that it's clear he lied, er, misspoke, about McCain being "isolated" when we know he wasn't.

He didn't have to say anything, is the funny part, it was his own bringing it up that made it an issue.

"Misspoke" will be what he claims tonight, I bet. We better buy the right wingers some new spokes, I think the wheels of their collective bicycle are disintegraing.

Meanwhile the funnest part of this whole thing was the line from the McCain campaign "How dare anyone suggest that McCain, a former POW, could cheat!"

It's just so revealing about their approach: pretend that "Oh he hates it when people bring that up" then bring it up constantly, even when it has nothing to do with the subject.

Q: "How is Senator McCain today?"

A: "Well, as a former POW, he..."

It's now bound to go down along with "A noun, a verb, and 9/11". Just substitute "POW" for 9/11 and there you have it. They should never have pushed that meme so hard, it's become clear now that they think they can escape any scrutiny about any subject by just yelling "POW! Boo!" and expect everyone to immediately cower and bow down in awe. And stop asking the question they were asking. Sorry McCain camp, not everyone is Bob Schieffer.