Joe Biden, meanwhile, produced a blizzard of misstatements, distortions and outright lies.

The most irritating and most seriously misleading involved the relative cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three times, with great earnestness and passion, he cited a mysterious statistic claiming that we spend more every three weeks in Iraq than we have invested in the Afghan War for its duration.

Actually, statistics from The Congressional Research Service (posted on the website of the Center for Arms Control and Nuclear Non-Proliferation) show that our biggest Iraq expenditure came in Fiscal Year 2008 and reached $158 billion – or $3 billion per week. This means that Biden’s “three weeks in Iraq” would cost $9 billion at most.

And what about our commitment to Afghanistan?  Has it really been $9 billion over seven years, as Biden suggested? The truth is we’ve spent $177.5 total in Afghanistan (compared to $661.1 billion in Iraq). This means that Biden either over-stated the cost of our war in Iraq TWENTY TIMES, or else understated the cost of our war in Afghanistan by a factor of twenty. Either way, the jerk is wrong by a distance equal to the width of the State of Delaware, and he delivered an Alaska-sized blooper three times in one evening.

Israelis dispute pro-Obama video

Videos: The Ayers connection

This morning, we have a series of videos dealing with the intersection of William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and the Obamas. Sarah Palin’s accusation that Barack Obama “palled around with terrorists” has Team Obama attempting to play defense on the morning talk shows. David Axelrod went first and tried to play the Ignorance Is Bliss card:

JIM ACOSTA: Now a college professor in Chicago, Ayers and Obama served together several years on a nonprofit board. And in 1995 Ayers hosted a coffee for Obama when the young community organizer was making his first run for the State Senate. At this point looking back, should he not have done that?

DAVID AXELROD: Well I mean, when he went, he certainly — he didn’t know the history.

ACOSTA: The Democratic nominee’s chief strategist David Axelrod maintains Obama at that time had no idea about Ayers’ violent past.

Next, Robert Gibbs attempts to say the same thing, as well as calling it a “distraction” again:

ROBERTS: I just want to try to get to the heart of it so that people at home can understand. Our Jim Acosta talked with your senior strategist David Axelrod about this. In 1995 William Ayers held kind of a get to know you event at his place where he was introducing Barack Obama to the political culture there in Chicago when he was running for the state senate for the first time. David Axelrod said that at that meeting Senator Obama was not aware of Ayers’ radical background. Is that true?

GIBBS: Look, if that’s what David said, that is true. look, again, this is a relationship, excuse me, that Barack Obama has condemned the actions of Bill Ayers. This is somebody that “”The New York Times”" said Barack Obama’s not close to, and, again, John, this is a way of distracting the American people from what’s important. just in this more than’s paper John McCain’s campaign said if we talk about the economy, we lose. That’s why we’re seeing the type of dishonorable, dishonest, despicable smear campaign that you see right now with only four weeks to go in this election.

Of course, voters have to make up their own mind as to whether associating with domestic terrorists is just a “distraction” or an indictment on the judgment of the candidate. However, both Axelrod and Gibbs make it clear that judgment is applicable here. The Obamas had a long association lasting several years with Ayers and Dohrn, serving on two boards together and working for Ayers for several years at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Does Axelrod now want to argue that Obama never learned about Ayers’ radical politics and track record as a Weather Underground terrorist? How clueless would Obama have to be to miss that?

As this video shows — very, very clueless (via Public Secrets):

Ayers was hardly quiet about his life and his aspirations. He wrote a book about it in 2001. Chicago Magazine did a lengthy profile of him at the time, complete with pictures of Ayers standing on an American flag thrown on the ground in an alley. Nevertheless, Obama continued to work with Ayers at the Woods Fund and work together on public events. Either Obama liked what Ayers did, or he’s the most clueless politician to have ever reached the US Senate, and neither commends itself as a recommendation for a presidential candidate.

Sarah Palin attracted considerable outrage from the media for publicly pointing out Obama’s association with Ayers and Dohrn as “palling around with terrorists”. However, she forced the media to finally start covering it, as the CNN clips show, and to put Obama on the defensive over it. As we see here, that defense looks terribly weak.

527 ad: “Fighting”

A new group opposed to the bailout has released an ad discussing the origins of the financial crisis, and hailing John McCain as one of the few who sounded the alarm.  “Fighting” hits Democrats hard, in a manner that many Republicans want to see Team McCain adopt:

How effective will this be? It depends on the resources Right Change has. This kind of message needs constant repeating to counteract the notion that “deregulation” caused this crisis. Deregulation didn’t create this crisis, but to the extent that regulators didn’t stop it from snowballing, it was Democrats who blocked them from doing their job, and Republicans who wanted stricter controls on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

John McCain has been very quiet about this, preferring to talk about greed on Wall Street as a cause. However, having watched Nancy Pelosi destroy a carefully-constructed alliance with a partisan attack just before the first House vote, McCain probably wanted to avoid throwing blame while negotiating a second package. Now that the bill has passed Congress, McCain can start telling the real story of the collapse — how he and a few other Republicans called for stricter controls on Fannie and Freddie, only to be blocked by Democrats using government to distort the lending markets while they called OFHEO regulators racist for blowing the whistle.

McCain needs to help himself on this issue. Barack Obama took more money from Fannie and Freddie sources over the last four years than any other member of Congress, then stood silent while they defrauded investors. McCain has to start making that case today, and every day for the next four weeks. Even outside of the election, the American people need to know what really happened — so that we don’t do it again.

For Tax Year 2006

Are you listening, McCain advisors?

I’m told that McCain advisors are reluctant to argue Democratic responsibility for the mortgage crisis, because they might be accused of being racists.

Wake up, McCain advisors. You are already getting accused of racism for making other perfectly legitimate points. Why on God’s green Earth would you hold back on one of the best arguments you can make because someone might play the race card?

Do you people even want to win?

That’s a serious question.

AP: Palin’s a racist for bringing up Ayers, or something; Update: McCain camp responds

Update: Palin’s not backing down, and neither is Team Maverick:

“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. Americans need to ask themselves if they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted felon help them buy their house — because those aren’t smears, those are true facts about Barack Obama.” —Tucker Bounds, spokesman McCain-Palin 2008

Update: E&P makes a good point, inadvertently, in trying to absolve Obama: If The One is guilty of looking the other way at Ayers’s terrorist past, so is pretty much every other Democrat in Chicago. This isn’t an “Obama problem,” in other words, as much as it is a problem with his side not fretting overly much about youthful ’60s indiscretions like killing cops with pipe bombs in the name of progress.

I have evidence to support my theory. McCain himself, when Barack Obama pretended that he himself had been a visionary on this issue, McCain responded with a tepid “I warned the public too.” And the ad I gave you was from the NRCC, not McCain’s campaign.

Michelle Malkin has expressed the same sentiment:

One of the most glaring failures of both John McCain and Sarah Palin in their debates has been their failure to pound Obama/Biden/the Dems on the Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment Act debacles.

Why? Why? Why are they passing up a golden opportunity to expose the disastrous consequences of decades of Democrat social engineering, minority-mau-mau-ing, and crony pseudocapitalism?

Apparently, the campaign is worried about being called racists, and thinks the argument is too complicated.

Nonsense. It’s a simple argument. Every American paying attention knows that Fannie and Freddie contributed significantly to this problem. All you have to do is play the videos quoting Republicans worrying about Fannie and Freddie, as contrasted with the quotes from Democrats claiming there was no crisis.

If they couldn’t see this crisis coming, how are they going to see an Al Qaeda attack coming?

If the McCain campaign handlers are the reason that Sarah Palin (and John McCain) didn’t hit back hard in the debates on Fannie and Freddie, then they have to be the most stunningly incompetent bunch of campaigners in history. This crisis is the biggest thing going. McCain and Palin have a great argument to make.

LET THEM MAKE THAT ARGUMENT.

Or we’re going to lose.

It’s just that simple.