Rick Moran, on the Obama campaign’s counterfactuals. It’s hard to imagine the press letting a Republican get away with this kind of thing.

Jennifer Rubin makes a pretty good point:

Obama claims that experience is not as important as “judgment” or “change.” By manufacturing or existing accomplishments, however, he suggests that he does not buy his own pitch.

Rather, his repeated attempts to bolster his resume indicate that he may be nervous about his non-existent record of achievement. Not trusting that voters will buy his disparagement of experience, Obama is now resorting to a common, but risking tactic of under-qualified job-seekers: fudge the resume.

Resume fraud carries grave risks. If the employer finds out you are lying, you are unlikely to get the job, even if the competition is weak. And for Obama, who is already belaboring under an avalanche of tough press about his many policy flip-flops, he hardly needs another storyline which sheds doubt on his credibility and character.

I think that it’s things like this that are the reason the polls now seem to be even, even with the media love affair continuing.

[Update a while later]

Victor Davis Hanson lists some of Senator Obama’s other problems:

Obama has a poor grasp of history, geography, American culture, and common sense — whether the number or location of states in the Union, basic facts about WWII or where Arabic is spoken, or his sociological take on Pennsylvania, etc. His advisors realize this, and are playing 4th-quarter defense by keeping him out of ex tempore, non tele-prompted hope and change venues, where his shallowness can manifest itself in astonishing ways.

I was just listening to NPR in the car, and Terry Gross was interviewing Ryan Lizza on Fresh Air. He just had a long piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s Chicago history. He was talking about the Rezko housing project problems, and he said that Obama didn’t seem to be involved in the corruption, that the worst you could say about him was that exercised bad judgment.

Well, that in itself is saying something pretty bad, given that his claim to the presidency is that, while he may not have as much experience as his opponents, he has good judgment. But was his Rezko involvement good judgment? Was his attending a bigoted church for twenty years good judgment? Was it good judgment to pre-declare the surge a failure before it even began? So now it’s hard to make a case for either his experience or his judgment.

I know that the Senator believes that to know him is to love him, but I think he may find out that as the campaign actually engages after the conventions, the more people learn about him, the less inclined they’ll be to make him the next commander-in-chief.

…if, say, a white man expressed the desire to castrate a black man? Particularly the first black man to be a major-party presidential nominee?

In Obama’s campaign ad:

Even under the most generous reading imaginable could any of that count as passing legislation that extended health care for wounded troops? The Chicago Tribune noted the problem on its blog last week but defended Obama by pointing out that John McCain didn’t vote for the bill either. That would be an interesting piece of information if John McCain had cited this bill as among his chief legislative accomplishments.

The Obama team’s desire to pad the resume is understandable — it’s awfully slim after all. But this kind of dishonesty will catch up with them…or at least it should.

Yes, it should, but maybe it won’t. Bill Clinton’s supporters didn’t seem to mind that he was an inveterate liar. But Obama’s supporters (which includes much of the media) not only don’t mind, but actually hope he is.

[Afternoon update]

Is he finally losing his teflon?

Lileks has more thoughts on the subject:

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?