So here it comes: the scary black man who wants to kill U.S. troops.

Not a word of this is true, obviously. It's basically self-refuting to see the McCain campaign clip off Obama's full Afghanistan comments from August -- "We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there" -- which is an obvious call to bolster troop levels. The concern about civilian casualties were echoed by such America-haters as Hamid Karzai and George Bush, as even this Nedra Pickler (!) factcheck points out.

And to their ranks, let's add Gen. McClellan McKiernan, from his press conference at the Newseum last week, when he discussed the counterproductivity of civilian casualties to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. This is a transcript from my voice recorder:

[Shows a slide of himself at a meeting of Afghan villagers] The picture in the bottom center, if I could dwell on that for just a second, yes, that's myself with my back turned to you, at a province that doesn't need to be named, and it has to do with civilian casualties. It's an episode -- and I'd like to dwell on civilian casualties with you for a minute. We take great measures to try to avoid civilian casualties. But when a mistake is made and inadvertently there is a loss of civilian life unintentionally, we try to make sure that we get out with the truth as quickly as we can. We have a hard time beating the insurgent to the story because he's not concerned with the truth. But in this particular case I went to this location and talked with a group of tribal elders in an area where we think we inadvertently caused some civilian casualties. And to tell you what an incredible sort of population lives in Afghanistan, that fellow sitting in the middle of the picture there, he lost seven members of his family. Yet he came and talked to me that day, allowed me to apologize to him, allowed us to have a shura, allowed us to talk, and at the end of the day he professed that he did not want the Taliban back in power, that he supported the presence of international forces. I don't think that would happen in our country, in the United States of America. I don't think someone that lost seven members of their family would come sit down with somebody in the military and even have a discussion. But it tells you about the resiliency of that population. But I hope you ask me something else about civilian casualties, because that's something we try to go to great lengths to avoid in that country. ...

[Reporter asks question about civilian casualties]... First of all, it's important that ISAF, that the military, try to come out with the truth as quickly as possible. But we inherently play catch-up to anybody that reports a number or an event. We do try at least to get a truthful accounting in the media. It's very difficult to come up with numbers in Afghanistan after there's been a military operation. A lot of that's cultural, because people generally are taken away and buried quite quickly in that culture, so it's not like you can exploit a site for a period of time and come up with an accurate number, so a lot of it's based on estimates. And then finally I won't go into specifics on rules of engagement, but I'll say that principles such as positive identification of targets to the best of our ability, the concept of proportionality, precise planning considerations on type of weapons and use of weapons -- all of that is factored in, all of that is attempted to be disciplined in units before they even come to the theater. But when you fight a counterinsurgency, by the nature of an insurgency, where the enemy mixes in with the population, it is virtually impossible to completely avoid civilian casualties in that kind of environment.

McCain's new slogan really ought to be Dishonor Before Death.

A Pal Around McCain

By Harold Meyerson
Monday, October 6, 2008; A15

"There's no question that we have to change the subject here," a senior Republican operative told The Post's Michael D. Shear in a story published Saturday.

The "subject" in question is the economy and how to fix it. As Americans have taken their eye off the ball -- that is, off John McCain's sterling qualities of character and command -- by focusing on the economy, Barack Obama has surged into the lead nationally and in many key battleground states.

So long as the candidates talk about that pesky economy, McCain's handlers have realized, McCain will continue to swoon. Thus the campaign has announced that it will go on the attack again on the momentous topics of Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the onetime Weatherman who has been a University of Illinois education professor for nearly two decades.

Campaigning on Saturday in Colorado, Sarah Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" by associating with Ayers, citing as her source a New York Times story from that morning. In fact, the story concluded that the Obama-Ayers "relationship" consisted of both men attending the board meetings of two Chicago organizations and that there had been no contact between the men, other than bumping into each other on the sidewalk (they live in the same neighborhood), since Obama went to the U.S. Senate in January 2005.

The story of Obama's interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago's civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation -- a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon's ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago's education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)

Go join your city's establishment, and see what it gets you.

But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America "a nation of whiners."

If we are to believe his managers, McCain will charge into tomorrow night's debate seeking to "change the subject" from the economy to Obama's dangerous liaisons. It's not, however, likely to be a winning tactic. Obama will argue that in a time of deepening economic crisis, the public deserves a debate in which the candidates focus on their ideas for recovery rather than tendentious attacks on their rival's presumed associates. If pressed, though, he can mention that it is McCain's senior economic adviser who has diminished American solvency and power beyond the wildest dreams of anti-American terrorists.

meyersonh@washpost.com

Read more from Harold Meyerson on washingtonpost.com's new opinion blog, PostPartisan.