Jake Tapper, a political reporter for ABC News, did a piece yesterday that got some deserved criticism. He wrote, among other things:
I've seen racism in campaigns before -- I've seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I've seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was alleged, by the charming friends and allies of then-Gov. George W. Bush, to have been a McCain love-child with an African-American woman.
What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today.
Pretty inflammatory.
Tapper is right that McCain's people didn't call Obama anything overtly racist. But then, maybe they didn't need to. Maybe someone in McCain's campaign just used their trusty thesaurus.
Let's see what they might have found, after the jump. And we'll see as well, that Jake Tapper, not so long ago, knew better.