You Read This Stuff And Think It Came From the Onion But No....

From Politico:
"Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called 'liars'...But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy...'Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,' Schmidt told reporters. But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong...Asked about the series of errors, McCain aides could not provide evidence to back up Schmidt’s assertions"
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13747.html

From Joe Klein at Time Mag:
"Ben Smith [Politco] fact-checks the McCain campaign's ridiculous conference call assault on the press. But it should be remembered that Steve Schmidt is doing this for two (nefarious) reasons:
1. he's hoping to work the refs: if he complains enough about press bias, we mainstream sorts will cower, cringe and try to seek false equivalences between the two campaigns.
2. the more time we spend covering this nonsense, the less we'll spend on the real issues in this campaign.
Sorry, Steve. Not buying."