How Scott Got Hot

"My hunch is that McCain really wants to debate Iraq--he really, truly thinks it's the most important issue facing the country, and thinks he can persuade people on the merits--and so his political advisers are doing the best they can with it. I guess I respect that on some level. And, politically, it does reinforce his truth-teller, 'I'd rather lose an election than lose a war' image. But, assuming Obama is able to establish a minimum level of national security credibility, which I think he will, McCain may be making a strategic mistake."

In Time, Michael Kinsley examines whether Obama's ties to the Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn is troubling:

"Ayers and Dohrn are despicable, and yet making an issue of Obama's relationship with them is absurd.

"In America we believe in redemption and even self-reinvention. And we don't usually require stagy Stalinesque recantations. But Dohrn and Ayers test the limits of that generosity. They remain spectacularly unrepentant, self-indulgent, unreflective--still bloated with a sense of entitlement, still smug with certainty . . .

"If Obama's relationship with Ayers, however tangential, exposes Obama as a radical himself, or at least as a man with terrible judgment, he shares that radicalism or terrible judgment with a comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others--including Republicans and conservatives--who have embraced Ayers and Dohrn as good company, good citizens, even experts on children's issues."

And in the great back story department, Keith Olbermann reveals what really happened when Rupert Murdoch fired him as a Fox sportscaster (it involves the L.A. Dodgers).

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."