Cindy McCain is on record stating her husband will stand for "none of this negative stuff, you won't see that come out of our side at all." Quite laughable. If anything, that's all that's been coming out of the McCain campaign -- negative, negative, and more negative.

But Jonathan Alter pretty much hits it on the head:

Look, this thing—it‘s really clear what‘s going on here. You got people in the “National Review,” for instance, a conservative magazine, telling John McCain, “If you don‘t turn into an attack dog and rip Barack Obama and try to depict to him as unpatriotic, you‘re going to lose.” So, this is what they urged him on the cover of that magazine. A lot of other Republican strategists are saying the same thing.

I happen to think they‘re wrong. I don‘t think that‘s the way for McCain to win, but clearly and his campaign has accepted that advice and they have decided that they have to kind of throw these desperation “Hail Mary” passes that are not going to help him, but it‘s like the ad they had last week that said that Obama created, was responsible for the high gas prices.

People don‘t believe these kinds of ads. They know this was a scheduling snafu. They know that there wasn‘t any horrible judgment here. The horrible judgment is, supporting a $1 trillion war with people like me and John McCain did at the time. That‘s bad judgment.

Yes, Alter and McCain got it wrong big-time concerning this catastrophically expensive war, Obama got it right. But with the Olympics coming up soon followed by the Dem convention, apparently McCain's camp has decided their best chance to smear Obama ala Swift Boat style has to come early and often. We're seeing that now. Hopefully Alter is right and "people don't believe these kinds of ads" but we know they've believed fabricated crap before so it may be naive thinking.