UPDATED: John McCain Campaign is a Fraudulent Disgrace

WATCH the video clip first. More background from Greg Sargent:

The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.

The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA's Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

So let me see if I got this right.

While Barack was tending to his sick grandmother (who admitted that she used to be afraid of black men) the McCain camp pushed a scam, to personify the "typical white woman" who, in their story, was attacked, and sexually assaulted and mutilated by the big blackety-black black man simply because she supported McCain, leaving Barack's campaign, while he was tending to his sick grandmother, to take on these thugs and not allow them to turn a hoax, which exploits perhaps the deepest racial, sexual, and political wounds of our history, into a Molotov cocktail just days after a Pennsylvania congressman called his fellow citizens in this very district racist rednecks and less than two weeks before the biggest presidential election in a century, all in the crucial state of Pennsylvania that the thugs have been plotting to steal for months, despite being down double digits in the polls for the last, oh, week or two.

This only days after Rudy Giuliani started calling Pennsylvania voters to tell them Barack is soft on crime.

And tonight, MSNBC'S David Gregory revealed, unwittingly, because he's too stupid and too afraid to do it any other way, that the McCain campaign was intending to run hard and heavy on race and crime and crime and race, with this racially divisive hoax as the backdrop, and their White Ice Queen held up as the Compassionate Mother and Energy Goddess, all the way through election day.

The good news? The police didn't believe the story. No black men were rounded up and brutalized and arrested for no reason. No race riots broke out all over the nation.

The young woman can get the mental help she needs.

Anybody who will still vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin after this is an unapologetic bigot. Period.

Anybody who will also still promote their vileness and try to convince others to vote for them is an unrepentant domestic terrorist. A racial arsonist.

Enough is enough.

UPDATE 10.25: The young woman said this morning that she's not sorry for what she did, claims she doesn't even remember most of it, including how the backwards B got onto her face, and she blamed the media for blowing the story out of proportion.

Let her rot in jail.

UPDATE 10.25: Here's a Monie quote (pun intended) from over on JJP:

I was very suspicious of the timing and location---Pittsburgh--- when this story broke. And especially how quiclkly the story disseminated to the press before the full investigation was allowed to take place.

But we must look back to the primaries between Obama and Clinton, from which McCain has employed many of the same tactics.

Pennsylvania proved to ba a hotly contested race that was heralded as the "resurrection" of Clinton's campaign.

Let us not forget that around the time of the Pennsylvania primary, the news cycles were bombarded with

the "bitter" comments
the Jeremiah Wright You-tube sensationalism
Geraldine Ferraro on every channel claiming if Obama was not a black man, he would not have made it this far
Ed Rendell publicly proclaiming many white Pennsylvanians won't vote for Obama because he is black
Hillary Clinton's "Rocky-esque" comeback story.

Of course, Hillary won in the Penn. primary by about 10 points...though her lead of 30 points leading up to the primary was cut drastically in the end.

Clinton, herself has roots in Scranton.....just a week before the DNC convention, Clinton's brother had a meeting with Carly Fiorina, one of McCain's economic advisor in Pennsylvania.

So make no mistake, this hoax was manufactured to be a race-baiting tool in an area that has been lukewarm to Obama. McCain hopes to capture a "comeback" story of his own there---so don't be surprised if we see Jeremiah Wright ads, mailers, and robocalls since this hoax did not pan out quite the way many would have hoped. We may also see some 9/11 references since Pennsylvania is also tthe site in which Flight 93 crashed. And we know Republicans have already politicised the tragedy at the RNC Convention. They will be playing off the same divisive politics that the Clinton camp was mildly successful at doing in Pennsylvania.