Down in the Mud

Let's review the rather low state of this campaign season:

A GOP ad against Senate candidate Harold Ford -- featuring a white seductress who says she met the black lawmaker at a Playboy party and that he should call her -- is so odious and racially tinged that Ford's Republican opponent, Bob Corker, denounces it.

Republican Wyoming congresswoman Barbara Cubin tells a wheelchair-bound Libertarian candidate after a debate: "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you in the face."

Hillary Clinton's opponent says she used to be ugly -- and why did Bill marry her, anyway? -- but now looks okay thanks to millions in plastic surgery.

Rush Limbaugh says Michael J. Fox is exaggerating his Parkinson's in political ads.

A John Kerry spokesman calls carping liberal bloggers "cowards."

Anybody out there feel like taking a shower?

Look, politics is a contact sport. Sharp attacks are part of the game. So is negative advertising. But there's such a thing as going too far, and suddenly we're awash in case studies.

Besides, dissing Parkinson's victims and people in wheelchairs and making fun of women's looks is probably going to backfire, no?

Meanwhile, President Bush now seems to have news conferences all the time, doesn't he? I wonder if that ends on Nov. 7.

His new talking point -- that the Iraq government will try to meet some benchmarks to demonstrate progress -- kind of blew up on him yesterday:

"Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki put himself at odds with the American government that backs him on Wednesday, distancing himself from the American notion of a timetable for stabilizing Iraq and criticizing an American-backed raid on a Shiite militia enclave.