"I would draw your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time"

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident."

It appears that I may have overestimated the integrity of our leading national media organizations. Or maybe I've just underestimated their complicity in the GOP's latest and most egregious episode of Desperate Dirty Tricks(TM), represented by the crazy face-carving bitch from College Station, Texas and the McCain campaign's urgent attempts to plaster her carved up face across every teevee and newspaper and magazine cover in the land, thereby scaring the shit out of every right-thinking, god-fearing, suburban soccer mom in the country, causing them to immediately drop their copy of InStyle and run, not walk to the nearest early-polling place so that they can vote down the angry dark-skinned black baby-killing face-cutting communist Muslim hordes threatening to destroy our Great White Jesus-Sanctuary of a country.

Because these media organizations were lied to by at least two people working for McCain's campaign. The face-carver herself and the campaign's Pennsylvania media flack/hack. These lies, in turn, caused not a few of these media organizations to blare completely false and dangerously sensational allegations which threatened to incite severe racial strife in the few remaining days before a rather important election.

I call this a big story. Fox News itself, de facto media arm of the GOP, officially claimed that this "race-baiting" would spell the death of McCain's chances in the election. But that was before. Now? Dead silence. As far as I can tell, not a word anywhere in any major newspaper or on any major tv outlet.

Where are the calls for an explanation? Where are the demands for accountability? Why does McCain's Pennsylvania spokesman still have a job? McCain's organization -- and McCain himself -- are responsible for this. Sure, they didn't put the face-carving bitch up to it (at least I don't think so), but there can be no argument that they jumped in with both feet and attempted to use this obviously ridiculous story to maximum political effect. In my mind, this is far worse that McCain/Palin casually throwing out "Marxist" "socialist" and "palling around with terrorists" bullshit.

And furthermore -- fuck it -- unless and until McCain repudiates the face-carver and her enablers and fires the people responsible for this, I think it is not unreasonable to go ahead and lay the entire thing at his feet. Who's to say that he didn't put the face-carver up to the whole thing? He's not denying it. His people's fingerprints are all over the whole mess, and he's done nothing of any substance to distance himself from it.

But you can be sure that McCain won't address it in any meaningful way without pressure from news media. But right now they are displaying an extraordinary lack of backbone, or maybe they just don't mind acting as an unprincipled megaphone for the very worst kind of racist lies. At a minimum, you'd think they would publicly question the credibility of the people that fed them this shit. Right now they're not even doing that. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens with the next big desperate dirty trick. Because, as this incident has demonstrated beyond any doubt, these are people without shame or conscience, and as soon as they understand that no one is being held accountable for even something like this, then the one remaining check on their behavior will have been removed, in which case the repulsiveness of their next dirty tricks will only be limited by the awfullness of their imaginations.