The John McCain campaign is used to a Barack Obama who is both is stoically unresponsive and decidedly indifferent in the face of sustained McCain attacks and smears that they have waged against Obama with impunity. Now that Obama is showing signs that he is about to take the fight to them, and fight fire with fire, they are getting nervous and are in the process plunging  nto a paroxysm of hysteria as they, in desperation, look for any dirt they find to throw at Obama. Throwing more and more of discredited thrash and distortions at Barack, in the process unwittingly compromise their own candidate by inadvertently bringing to the surface McCain's own scandals. There are plenty of them to go around,  to say the list. The Obama camp has been holding back, believing that here they were dealing with civil and descent individuals. But unbeknownst to them these are the same people who destroyed Al Gore. The same thugs who detroyed John Kerry, and if Obama is not careful their going to do the same to him. 

As this writer, as well as numerous prominent progressive supporters of Barack Obama  have raised concerns about what seems to be an increasing likelihood that we are faced with a situation in which our candidate is approaching a tipping point in this election. A moment to recapture the strategic initiative lost in the wake of his international foray, or lose out in a race which the Bush/McCain/Republican smear and attack machine have all but turned this election into a referendum on Obama rather than on Bush and McCain who, consumed in a binge of fear of Obama, have launched their most negative attacks to-date for all the damage they can inflict. And the promiscuous and spineless media have peddled the ''Obama referendum" narrative as if it were a binding universally accepted conventional wisdom. Hence it should be of no surprise that this fraudulent line of thinking has gained traction on an alarming dimension to the extent that it remains uncontested by the Obama campaign that should know better that this election should, indeed, be a referendum  on George Bush and John McCain who is pushing for Bush's third term.   After almost 8 years of a corrupt and incompetent presidency in collusion with equally corrupt now-out-power Congressional Republicans, the environment has to a large degree shifted in favor of the Dems in a reconfiguration of a political landscape that has increasingly grown treacherous for Republicans. Thus the extreme smears and negativity of the of McCain's campaign should be seen in the context in which they have come to the conclusion that McCain, as he stands, will not sell to the American people. Hence they have put all their eggs in one basket,  hoping that as much as these negative ads are all they have, they would count on their not being counteracted by the Obama camp---or at the very least the response would be papably tepid, and I am afraid so far they have been proven right.