Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.

The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. In this piece at The Corner, Mark R. Levin, bristling over normally rational conservatives like Colin Powell and Charles Fried falling under Obama's demagogic spell, pushes ajar the door to his inner psyche, where the horrors are of the communist-cum-Nazi variety. Levin doesn't go in much for the Obama as closet Muslim nightmare. I'm sure it's just a failure of imagination.

You might think the U.S. attorneys scandal would be enough to make the White House steer clear of voter fraud bamboozlement in the very next election. You'd be wrong.

It is time for the McCain campaign to come clean about what role any of its staffers may have had in hyping or pushing the press to hype the charges stemming from Ashley Todd's vicious and reprehensible hoax.

As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, McCain Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman pushed reporters on a highly incendiary version of Todd's hoax -- providing reporters with quotes from the fictitious attacker and telling them the the "B" scratched on Todd's face stood for "Barack." As the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson aptly put it, Feldman's actions showed "not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a ... racial backlash against the Obama campaign."

Our reporting did not find any direct evidence that the McCain campaign's national headquarters played a role pushing the story.

However, the national campaign has now come forward and lied about what happened in Pennsylvania. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers has now told NBC that alleged quotes from the McCain campaign in early reports of the story were actually the product of "sloppy reporting" and that they were actually quotes from the Pittsburgh police.

This is simply not credible.

Initial reports specifically quote the McCain campaign. And at least two sources involved in the contemporaneous reporting have come forward and said on the record that the quotes came directly from the McCain campaign. To believe that two separate local news organizations made the identical mistake with the same quotes and are now both covering it up is simply not credible. But that is what Rogers is now claiming.

The McCain campaign's after-the-fact lie about its role in this hoax makes it essential that it provide a complete and honest account of both the local and national campaign's role. As I said above, we did not find direct evidence of the national McCain campaign pushing this story. But Gov. Palin did call Todd after the purported attack, as did Sen. McCain. And news of these calls was provided to the press.

The involvement of the candidates and specifically the release of such information -- which was clearly intended to bump up interest in the story -- shows some level of involvement by the national campaign.

Perhaps it is simply that the national campaign heard a staffer had been mugged and had the principals call the purported victim. One might further speculate that it was only the Pennsylvania communications director who heard about the calls and took it upon himself to push these out to the media.

Possible, but certainly a generous interpretation. And now that we see the national McCain campaign making false statements about what happened, its credibility on the whole story is simply too damaged to allow such a benefit of the doubt.

Reporters who the McCain camp cannot stonewall need to push for a clear accounting of what happened -- starting by coming clean on Feldman's role. If this were simply some other minor campaign mystery, the sort that is routinely tossed off late in a hard-fought campaign, it might not matter. But the awfulness of what was attempted here makes nothing less than a full accounting necessary.

The McCain camp is denying that it was a campaign spokesperson who told local TV reporters in Pittsburgh that the "B" supposedly scrawled on the face of a young McCain campaign worker was a reference to "Barack" Obama, angrily carved into her face with a knife by a black mugger because she was a McCain supporter.

Of course we now know the victim's entire account was a hoax. I suspect the McCain campaign's denial is, too.

In response to our story, campaign spokesperson Brian Rogers told MSNBC that the campaign didn't provide those details to the local reporters, but that the police did, and the reporters were sloppy in attributing them to the McCain campaign (at the 0:54 mark):

So here's what the McCain camp would have you believe. Two different TV stations. Two different reporters. Neither could distinguish what they were told by the police (whom they presumably deal with on a daily basis) from what a campaign flack told them. So thorough is their sloppiness that even after the fact, upon reflection, both reporters stick by their stories, continuing to misattribute police statements to the campaign.

The McCain campaign denial also requires you to believe that, more than 12 hours after the concocted attack, the police -- who say they were suspicious of the hoaxster's account from the beginning -- started leaking to reporters an incendiary version of events that didn't even make it into the original police report of the incident.

Perhaps most implausibly, the McCain camp account requires you to give the benefit of the doubt to a crew that wants you to believe that Obama himself is a smooth-talking, baby-killing Islamic terrorist who embraces socialism and white women.

Joe Lieberman tries to patch things up with the Dems, insists he's been respectful to Barack Obama -- whom he's previously said doesn't put the country first. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

A few of the early Palin profiles reported out of Alaska noted her propensity to turn on early mentors or those who gave her key legs up after those people were no longer useful.

Now the latest from The Politico ...

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image -- even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

Obviously, Palin is the McCain campaign's responsibility, his fault, etc. But I must confess to some sympathy for the frustration and heartburn it must cause his staffers to hear Palin and her crew complaining about a "botched rollout and [her] tarnished image." That's gratitude for you. Sometimes it's just the product.

TPM Reader SW:

I have been a reader (and meager contributor) since 2002, and hit you several times daily. However, I think more and more of the stories you do (and do and do and do, like the Pittsburgh face carver of limited talent and imagination) are better over-covered by, say, the Huffington Post. (Yes, it's important to tell how the McCain campaign sleazed its way through this one-- that's the important story, and it must be told, and you did that well.) You have a great platform to educate people who need to be educated, and more importantly, want to be educated (unlike say, the Fox/Drudge clientele). Better, you people have the means and talent to educate your intelligent readers.

I spit out my coffee when I read this story yesterday. I had not heard that the banks who are getting the $250,000,000,000.00 (with twice as much still left to come) Treasury just gave out are not being told by Secretary Treasury Paulson to lend it to Joe Sixpack to buy his boss's business, but to buy other banks. What an effing outrage!

Joe Nocera's article details how Treasury has been lying since this crises began, just like an oily subprime lender, selling us something we don't need or want by telling us it's something else. If this article is true, our taxes are financing J.P. Morgan's and Goldman Sachs' 2008 executive bonus fund.

Can you please get word of this excellent article out?

Keep up the good work.

TPM Reader LP replies ...

SW says more education, less anything else.

I say TPM already does a great job of balancing this, with lots and lots of critical info and analysis and measured opinion, with a small bit of relevant but less-deadly-serious articles to help keep me and I'm presuming most readers able to move on to the next deadly-serious article without getting "serious" indigestion. There's only so much density and mass one can digest at a time.

I think it also helps attract new and keep old visitors coming back. A lot of journalists who come to this site, I'm guessing, wouldn't have the investigatory dedication or love of inquiry to often visit a more dry and academic site, or a site with a more staid demeanor.

Personally, I work online and TPM helps me stay awake, become much better informed, stay passionate about politics, and laughing each and every day. This is why I visit briefly usually every one to two hours. It's really quite an informative and serious enough site as is.

Looking forward to 2012, it seems Palin ain't quite the darling of the base some imagine.

If Republicans had to pick for 2012 today, it'd be: Romney 35%, Huckabee 26%, Palin 20%.

McCain volunteer Ashley Todd tells the police she's "upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm."

Ashley makes her perp walk.

A portion of the press conference held this afternoon by Pittsburgh police:

With only 11 days to go until Election Day, we take a look at the state of the race through the prism of some telling new polls ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

The pressure seems to be getting to McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. In response to a Marc Ambinder post suggesting that a faction in McCain's campaign thinks Palin is going off script to appeal to the base, Randy sent Ambinder this email ...

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

An old pal and handler of Chalabi, a big slime purveyor for McCain through the whole cycle, reputations are hard to repair. These must not be good times for Scheunemann.

It's that time of year.

TPM brings on a new class of interns each season. And we're now taking applications for our Winter 2008/2009 cycle. TPM interns are probably as intimately and rapidly involved in the preparation and production of news coverage as interns at any other news organization. And that ranges from work on the news section of the front page to research for our news blogs to video editing to bylined articles. Winter cycle interns will work closely on stories relating to the presidential transition and the start of the new Congress. The application deadline is November 7th. To find out details for how to apply, click here.

Well, for everyone who had eyes to see, this thing stunk to high heaven. But now we have official word that that McCain volunteer who had the straight-out-of- the-trash-novel story about being assaulted by a mugger-cum-Obama-activist has confessed that the whole thing was a hoax. It is the classic story that is so perfect for certain malevolent actors that if it hadn't happened they'd have to make it up. As indeed they did.

To say this is a dark moment does not do justice to the deep awfulness of this stunt. It's the metaphoric pedal-to-the-metal for the sleazy sub-rosa campaign of racial fear-mongering that so far has failed to derail Obama's candidacy.

There are many questions to be asked about who pushed this story yesterday afternoon and last night. A lot of explaining.

Conservative legal scholar and Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried, who just endorsed Obama, isn't just a Republican. He's actually one of McCain's campaign advisors.

Before they cycle down the memory hole, here's Fried on McCain's Honest and Open Election Committee and Justice Advisory Committee.

Key to his decision was McCain's "choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

The NRSC is pulling out of the Colorado Senate race.

Bill Weld endorses Obama.

Getting the sense that no moderate GOPer wants to be the one left holding the McCain bag on November 5th.

On the Street I believe this is referred to as a 'flight to quality' ...