From TVNewser:

…George is a friend and some­body whom I respect a great deal. The lesson is, for any young jour­nal­ist, that gen­er­ally speak­ing, things don’t vanish after you write them, and you’re not going to be 28 forever.

—New ABC News White House cor­re­spon­dent Jake Tapper, refer­ring to his col­league George Stephanopolous, whom, in 1999, Tapper called “a little shit,” “Prickarus,” “a star-​fucking Machiavelli,” and “a bul­ly­ing asshole.” (Gosh, at least he didn’t call him a shrimp. Oh wait: “I’ve seen Stephanopou­los in the gym, and he has no busi­ness point­ing out the homuncu­loid status of others.”)

News out­lets are report­ing on a new Spanish-​language Obama ad that com­pares McCain’s atti­tude toward immi­gra­tion to Rush Limbaugh’s. As a few people have noticed, that’s pretty bla­tantly mis­lead­ing, since McCain has gen­er­ally (though not com­pletely) been in favor of reform­ing immi­gra­tion, while Lim­baugh has come out stri­dently against it. The ad does the truth the fur­ther dis­ser­vice of pulling Limbaugh’s words out of con­text. Here’s ABC’s Jake Tapper on the sum of Obama’s sins:

The greater impli­ca­tion the ad makes, how­ever, is that McCain is no friend to Lati­nos at all, beyond issues of fund­ing the DREAM act or how NCLB money is dis­trib­uted. By link­ing McCain to Limbaugh’s quotes, twist­ing Limbaugh’s quotes, and tying McCain to more extrem­ist anti-​immigration voices, the Obama cam­paign has crossed a line into mis­lead­ing the view­ers of its new TV ad. In Span­ish, the word is erróneo.

It seems odd (read: polit­i­cally dumb) for Obama to release a mis­lead­ing ad at the very moment that he’s reap­ing the sym­pa­thy of a media envi­ron­ment that turned against John McCain for his mis­lead­ing ads.

So what’s going on here?

From Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Asked what work John McCain did as chair­man of the Senate Com­merce Com­mit­tee that helped him under­stand the finan­cial mar­kets, the candidate’s top eco­nomic adviser wielded visual evi­dence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Dou­glas Holtz-​Eakin told reporters this morn­ing, hold­ing up his Black­Berry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a pre­mier inno­va­tion in the past 15 years, comes right through the Com­merce Com­mit­tee. So you’re look­ing at the mir­a­cle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

The McCain cam­paign, fear­ing an Al Gore moment, quickly tried to explain Holtz-Eakin’s com­ment away as a joke, but ABC News’s Ron Clai­borne told Jake Tapper that it was noth­ing of the kind:

McCain may be making light of it, but it was not joke as told by Holtz-​Eakin. Just the oppo­site, he was seri­ous, emphatic and even a little defen­sive when he said it.