Joe Klein: Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are trying to sell a big lie--that the election is about the social issues of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the "angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past eight years.

Ev'ning links.

* It is totally, 100% appropriate to have paid product placement on the morning news.

* Slouching towards idiocracy: the L.A. Times is shutting down its book section.

* It hasn't been a very good week for John McCain. Having successfully goaded Obama into making a tremendously successful overseas trip that has managed to erase any lingering justification for McCain's own candidacy, he's now reduced to bitter rants that even a Villager like Joe Klein characterizes as scurrilous and desperate:

John McCain said this today in Rochester, New Hampshire:

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

This is the ninth presidential campaign I've covered. I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

* I hadn't heard very much crowing from early Obamaniacs on the internets, and I'm glad of that, but the netroots should really be breathing sighs of relief that they didn't get their way about John Edwards:

The National Enquirer spent months chasing John Edwards and digging into his relationship with Rielle Hunter before busting him spending the night in a hotel with the woman and the former Democratic presidential candidate's alleged love child.

* And The Edge of the American West remembers the Detroit riots, 41 years ago today.