Yesterday Business week reported that the McCain campaign had an ad script all ready to go, demonizing Obama had he visited the wounded troops at Landstuhl .

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

As it turns out, the McCain campaign could not have had an ad scripted and ready to go, because noone in the campaign, nor even in Obama’s own press corps new about the planned trip until it had been cancelled.

Griffin cites the following reasons why this couldn’t and wouldn’t be true.

1. The McCain campaign was not aware of the Obama visit to the troops in Germany beforehand, and neither was the traveling press with Obama. Therefore, the campaign could not have prepared a strategy around the trip. By the time they were reacting to his skipped visit of the troops, there was no reason to have talked about any other scenario.

2. Barack Obama has frequently visited the troops, including wounded troops at Walter Reade Hospital, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sen.. McCain has always praised him for doing so. The campaign has said that there is never a reason not to visit the wounded troops, which is why it reacted so strongly to his decision not to see the troops in Germany.

3. John McCain visited the same hospital in Germany during his last trip to Europe, so it would have been crazy to criticize Sen. Obama for doing so. [It is worth noting here that Sen. McCain, according to his spokesman, was on a Senatorial trip, not spending campaign funds as Sen. Obama was. The rules for visiting troops are different when spending campaign funds.]

…However, I have not been able to find a secondary source to back up the original source. Subsequent calls to a couple of other sources today were greeted with a much greater sense of nervousness because of the intense scrutiny around this issue inside the McCain campaign.

This leaves me with little ammunition to buttress the original assertion, especially in the face of the fierce denials by the McCain campaign.

Interesting the reporter did not try and assertain additional sources prior to running with the story. However based on his closing statement regarding Scott McClellan’s claim that he provided talking points to both Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, it is clear that factual reporting is not a priority of David Kiley’s. McClellan was on the Radio Factor the very next day apologizing for making that claim, and admitted that he had never provided talking points to O’Reilly or Hannity.

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Barack Obama, Election 2008, Features, John McCain, Liberals, Media, Politics