don't trust him

There's a rumor flying around that Colin Powell is going to endorse Barack Obama on Press the Meat this Sunday. From Politico:

The general’s camp is being coy about what he might or might not say on Sunday. But some McCain advisers suspect, without being sure, that Powell will endorse Obama.

“It’s going to make a lot of news, and certainly be personally embarrassing for McCain," a McCain official said. "It comes at a time when we need momentum, and it would create momentum against us.”

McCain officials are actively talking to the press and saying they think he'll endorse Obama? Maybe I've become too obsessed with strategy. Maybe my opinion of Colin Powell's independence and judgment have sunk too far below the truth. Maybe I'm giving the McCain too much credit. In any case, I find it very difficult to believe, not one week after Powell testified to the sterling word of honor of Ted Stevens, that he would then go on MTP and endorse Barack and that McCain's own officials would be the ones to make a story out of it on the preceding Friday.

If this story turns out to be true, John McCain is running the worst, most undisciplined campaign in history.

UPDATE (SUNDAY NIGHT): My mistake. Apparently McCain is, in fact, running the worst, most undisciplined campaign in history:

Bush to Curveball: "Give me a whopper!"

The LA Times tracks down the infamous "Curveball." It ain't pretty:

"He was corrupt," said a family friend who once employed him.

"He always lied," said a fellow Burger King worker.

And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market.
...
Alwan didn't share all his secrets. He didn't disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.
...
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could America believe such a person?"

This guy was a primary source for George W. Bush's prewar WMD claims. Remember the mobile weapons labs in Colin Powell's UN presentation? All Curveball.

your liberal media

From Huffington Post, re: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams:

For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team.