Over at TIME mag’s The Swampland blog, confused Karen Tumulty puts up the YouTube of the McCain ad Advice and supposes:

This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.

Let me stipulate: Obama’s Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn’t even mention a far more significant tie–that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama’s vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama’s principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.

The McCain campaign countered:

The only problem with Ms. Tumulty’s story is that we also released an ad today targeting Senator Obama’s extensive ties to Jim Johnson. The ad is called…Jim Johnson. And Ms. Tumulty might have been aware of its existence if she’d bothered to call this campaign to find out the facts (reporting) before indicting us for racism in a half-baked, late night rant. Tumulty also takes Obama’s response, signed by Mr. Raines, at face value. The Obama campaign says Raines didn’t advise the campaign, and Tumulty apparently wasn’t interested in getting to the bottom of that either. So we contacted Ms. Tumulty and told her of the multiple sources that tie Raines to Obama, including three separate instances in the Washington Post, none of which was ever challenged by Raines or the Obama campaign until yesterday.

Tumulty did not correct her post, she simply responded “I grew up in Texas. I know what this stuff looks like.” Well, now we all know what hysterical liberal bias looks like as well.

Tumulty is white and thus has no special insight into racism, having never been the target of it. What she is, is a confused liberal whose mind can create what she wants her eyes to see.

Tumulty puts up another blog post in which she weakly avers that if McCain weren’t racist, he’d have aired the Johnson ad first. She adds that Raines denies that he was an advisor to the Obama campaign.

Tumulty ought not to play the race card. Period. It does not matter if she be from Texas or Connecticut or Djibouti. We do not need hallucinatory ravings from people masquerading as journalists unless they identify themselves as members of the Obama campaign. If they are freelancing for Obama, with no “official” ties, as I suspect is the case with Tumulty, they ought to admit their bias beforehand.

But they never do.

BTWa: karen_tumulty@timemagazine.com