Oh, Broder

One thing hasn't changed while I was on vacation: David Broder is still a complete tool. Now he's blaming Barack Obama for the negative tone of John McCain's campaign.

"I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. "I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings" together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

Obama, in a phone interview yesterday from Elkhart, Ind., argued that "the classic tit-for-tat campaigning" of recent weeks "is part of the politics of the past that we have to move beyond." Ironically, having turned down McCain's proposal for weekly joint town halls, Obama argued that the formal debates, starting in late September, may refocus the campaign on real issues.

Nowhere in Broder's column does he mention that (a) just one day earlier, McCain had said the campaign was not negative at all and (b) McCain started attacking Barack Obama first, and he did it with a viciously mocking tone unparalleled in recent presidential campaign history.

But that's okay, at this point in his career, David Broder is so out of touch that he is basically a fiction writer. There may have once been a time that he was competent, but that time has long since past.