Yes, I'm impugning his character

John McCain is a liar. He lies repeatedly, unashamedly, even when he's called out on it. It's time for someone to say that.

And the Times reports the GOP is "worried" McCain is going negative so early. Bullshit. The GOP has never had any qualms about going negative. Early. And often.

Never mind, though, Obama is presumptuous.

UPDATE: Well, what do you know?

The essence of McCain's allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. "I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers," McCain said Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."

The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.

[...]

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said again yesterday that the Republican's version of events is correct, and that Obama canceled the visit because he was not allowed to take reporters and cameras into the hospital.

"It is safe to say that, according to press reports, Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of those reasons," he said. "We're not making a leap here."

Asked repeatedly for the "reports," Bounds provided three examples, none of which alleged that Obama had wanted to take members of the media to the hospital.

The McCain campaign has produced a television commercial that says that while in Germany, Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." The commercial shows Obama shooting a basketball -- an event that happened earlier in the trip on a stopover in Kuwait, where the Democrat spoke to troops in a gym before grabbing a ball and taking a single shot. The military released the video footage.

A three-pointer. Nothing but net.

But I digress. Back to the Post.

A reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Obama's decision not to visit Landstuhl, based on firsthand reporting from the trip, shows that his campaign never contemplated taking the media with him.

[...]

Gibbs was asked yesterday about the continuing allegations from McCain that the real reason was a desire to bring a media entourage to the hospital.

"That's completely untrue, and I think, honestly, they know it's untrue," Gibbs said.

John Cole explains this man bites dog story.

The McCain campaign forgot one basic thing on this attempted smear- the ego of the reporters and the mainstream media. These folks are fine with printing any lie you can come up with, as long as they have plausible deniability. You can feed them all sorts of shit about someone possessing WMD, or about Obama being Muslim, etc., so long as you cite unnamed sources or undisclosed sources in the government or anonymous experts, and you leave the blame somewhere else. They will print any old rumor if you do that.

But when you try to make them part of the lie, you just can’t get away with it. They were there on the trip- and the McCain idiots tried to make them part of the lie. And they might have gotten away with it had the Obama camp not fought back and had Andrea Mitchell not started the groundswell of media pushback. Now, when the McCain team tries to spread this lie, the egos in the media see it as an attack on their integrity, because they are named accomplices if they do not push back. Again, the ego of the media is the most important thing, and the McCain geniuses forgot it.

But as John also notes, these are reporters, not Fred Hiatt or David Broder or Richard Cohen, all of whom will replay Landstuhl-gate for all it's worth from now through October.