Yesterday, Sarah Palin grabbed her billy club and whaled on the fetid horse corpse that is Barack Obama’s passing acquaintance with Bill Ayers. As I said at the time, that was only the beginning. We’ve got a very long month left, and neither campaign is wasting any time whipping out the big guns.

In her first interview Bill Kristol, the only real-life American at noted Communist Party propaganda organ The New York Times, Sarah Palin brought up Reverend Wright again, even though McCain himself had set Wright was off limits.

The same day that article ran, the McCain campaign released an ad that creatively edits a clip of Obama speaking to make it appear as if he was calling American troops in Afghanistan murderers. McCain himself delivered a speech which Glennzilla called “one of the ugliest, nastiest, most invective-filled personality attacks a major candidate has ever delivered.”

And the punchline? Anonymous campaign staffers have openly admitted to three separate separate newspapers that they’re trying as hard as they can to distract people from actual issues: namely, the economy.

Speaking of the economy, Obama isn’t exactly playing with foam swords, either–his campaign released a short film and set up a website to make a story out of McCain’s association with corrupt banker Charles Keating.

But unlike the guilt-by-association story that McCain is pushing about Obama’s very tenuous connection to Ayers, the ballad of John and Charles is actually a story of guilt-by-guilt, as Matt Yglesias points out. McCain was not only accused of wrongdoing but admitted that it was “the wrong thing to do.”

That’s not what he’s trying this time around. Instead, his lawyers are claiming that he never did anything wrong, which, given that he’s on record as saying otherwise, seems like a terrible move. But it’s his campaign, I guess.