John Sidney McAlienating

By GottaLaff

You'd never know the press is souring on J Sid by watching the TV Machine, but...

Todd Purdum, who has been traveling with Sen. John McCain, says the Arizona's senator's once warm relationship with the press has cooled considerably as his aides force him to stay on message.

"It's a far cry from when I last spent quality airtime with McCain, in the fall of 2006, as we logged thousands of miles over several days in small planes, often with no traveling companions but each other. No topic was off-limits, and virtually no answer was off the record."

So the Fake Talk Express has finally made it into the consciousness of the press:

Purdum also reports that McCain is struggling "at having to rein in his natural instincts, in no small part because he well knows that it was his close relationship with the media that kept him alive a year ago when so much of the smart money -- and so many of the big mouths -- in his party had left him for dead."

And then there's this from Business Week about McDesperate:

Business Week's marketing and advertising correspondent David Kiley notes that Sen. John McCain's recent ad asserting that Sen. Barack Obama wouldn't visit wounded troops in Germany unless cameras were allowed "is a lie. It's a blatant lie."

"What the McCain campaign doesn't want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that's political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents -- a lie."

Note to Obama's campaign: They're handing you material for an ad on a silver platter. Take it. Use it. Win with it.