Cowardice seems to be a theme today out there on the internets. First there’s John cole, of Balloon Juice, who rightly notes that John McCain had every chance in the world, 90 minutes of them Tuesday night, to bring up William Ayers to Barack Obama’s face. Oh, sure, I know both Obama and Biden are bringing up this theme, and they can’t use the “C” word, but Cole can, and I love it. From Balloon Juice:

John McCain is not man enough to own his shit. John McCain will not openly confront Obama with his smears and lies and innuendo. John McCain will not come out and talk about Ayers, he has to be asked. That is why he goes to places like Fox News, so he can be asked. What a coincidence.

John McCain is a coward.

John McCain would rather hide behind his wife and Sarah Palin than say it himself.

He would rather produce 2 minute ads that his campaign will never pay to air anywhere, and hope that the tire-swinging media will bring up the topic so he doesn’t have to do it himself.

John McCain just wants to throw shit out there, and “raise questions” about Obama, and hope his supporters connect the dots, because he is too much of a coward to directly push this toxic stew. He would rather hide behind right-wing bloggers, surrogates, and scummy websites staffed with wingnut welfare recipients like the NRO and the Weekly Standard.

John McCain had 90 minutes to bring this stuff up to Obama, to his face, and passed.

John McCain is a coward.

It’s a fun little rant. David Winer has a more studied work on the cowardice of the entire Republican Party. I’m thinking this is beginning to be a cinsistent theme, eh? From Huffington Post:

The hypocrisy of the Republicans is so caustic and damaging in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. But the thing that gets me most is this idea that they put “Country First.” What a crock. When they attack people who support their opponents, they’re attacking half of the country they say they love and supposedly put first. I’ve had trouble putting my finger on this for years but there it is. Love isn’t something you just talk about, it’s something you do.

Perhaps the biggest blast today is by David Frum, a McCain supporter and columnist for the conservative National Review. He blasts the Republican Party for focusing on Barack Obama with their negative attacks while failing to put forward a positive agenda. Here’s his article from the National Review:

American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.

We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama’s associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

. . .

Here’s another thing to keep in mind:

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

Hey, it’s hard to argue with any of this. McCain is sending the women out to attack, and it is beginning to look like he’s simply afraid to confront Barack Obama on any issue whatsoever. The American people are not going to accept that. As Daily Kos notes, the GOP ticket is suffering in disapprovals compared to Obama dn Biden, and they’re only going to keep pushing those disapprovals higher.