Will the real John McCain please stand up?

Never mind. Its too late.

Dispatch from the Angry Middle:

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
- Abraham Lincoln

Tonight, while trying to watch a baseball game, I saw my first GOP attack ad.

There was no mention of a GOP platform... of what the McCain campaign actually stands for or intends to do for us if elected. It was simply a lowlife, nasty attack on Obama; endorsed by John McCain.

As someone who used to live in Arizona and who used to respect this man, I am horrified.

Senator McCain... how far you have fallen. And what a terrible shame.

I used to believe you really were a non-partisan maverick. When you attempted - with Senator Feingold - to reform election campaign finance, I thought you meant it. When you appeared on "Why We Fight" and referred to Eisenhower's warning about the Military Industrial Complex, I lauded your willingness to speak the truth out in the open. You seemed so unlike your lock-stepping, meanspirited, hypocritical GOP counterparts.

Apparently I was wrong.

I had never intended to say anything negative about you during your election run; there was no reason to speak ill of you, even if I don't agree with your... you do have a platform, don't you? There was no reason to speak ill of you as long as you remained a candidate of substance.

But I cannot sit by and watch you smear Barack Obama in such a sleazy fashion, while offering nothing of substance yourself.

Have you become nothing more than a Rovebot now? Will you literally do, say or endorse anything to get elected? Didn't you once find this kind of dirty, gutter politics disgusting and undignified when Rove used these very same tactics against you?

And yet you are willing to hire Rove and to adopt his sleazy tactics for your own 2008 campaign. My... how cynical.

That ad was an embarrassment. Your party will never understand that; but I once believed that you did. That was the very statesmanship that made you such a maverick in the political world.

When you said - was it really only last night? - that you planned to heal partisan divides in this nation, I am recalling that one George W. Bush said the very same thing. Right before stuffing the government with Bushies and denying Constitutional rights to anyone who didn't agree with him, or share his warped ideology.

I wondered when you hired Rove to be your propagandist, if you had gone over to the dark side. Perhaps you've simply always been there, pretending to be something other than what you are.

You are either not what you once were... or you never were that 'maverick' at all. I can't decide which reality is true. But one thing is painfully obvious; you're not the John McCain that I thought you were.

Attack ads are a sign of weakness, not of strength. They are a sign that the attacker has nothing of value to offer... and so he must pull another man down in an attempt to lift himself up. You have obviously given up every realistic - and popular - stand on the issues we care about. You've lost the Independents, but you don't appear to care. I guess your only option now - you can't attack the man you once were - is to attack the candidate who now represents the straight talk platform you abandoned.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
- Abraham Lincoln

I am ashamed for you. Gloves off.