The logic behind Gen. Wesley Clark's 18-word extemporaneity on "Face the Nation" was so extraordinarily self-evident, the pro-McCain right's expressed hostility to it made me wonder just which side of the political spectrum is actually wedded to political correctness. 

Said Clark, not as a plotted offering but as a casual response to a direct question: "I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."

Join the club, General. I know of no one who argues it is, although naturally there's an army of right-wing propagandists out there that strongly implies exactly that. It's what they do; we've come to expect it. So, in short, who cares? Theirs is largely a sideshow, and likely to remain that way in an election year dominated by day-to-day economic concerns.

Unless, of course, the left chooses to make a tit-for-tat game of it -- to widen the field of propagandistic play by publicly and endlessly renoting not just the subject of Clark's specific logic, but calling into question the broadest possible contours of John McCain's military service.

Yeah, right, now there's a bright idea, with real tactical wits behind it. Let's take a virtually already won election on economics and convert it into a debate on McCain's vastly honored (right or wrong, that's the way it is) military service, none of which his opponent, Barack Obama, has.

Not only that, let's expand its scope by reinforcing in the public's mind the issue of national security, which any and every mention of McCain's military past does, however subtly.

All of which, of course, redounds to the one issue that Obama is assiduously trying to put away with some finality -- the electoral scourge of patriotism and who authentically possesses it.

In a partial pushback to Clark's unplanned but potentially explosive honesty, Obama stressed yesterday in an Independence, Mo. speech that "the question of who is or is not a patriot all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bring us together. We can no longer afford these kinds of divisions."

Well, Republicans can. In fact, they can afford oodles of them, since they're pretty much all the GOP has to mark up and resell. They're also just about the only thing the American body politic has been buying from the right lately. Obama knows that, so he'd just as soon put this sort of flap to bed, asap.

Yet essentially working in concert with the pro-McCain right are those few on -- what else? -- the pixalated left, to be found, naturally, in their natural habitat of -- where else? -- the wild and woolly blogosphere.

It's friends like these that Obama most decidedly does not need, because their juicier ravings tend to make it into the mainstream press as examples of either leftist extremism or blogospheric mental instability, which the mainstream public would not otherwise ever read.

Yesterday, for example, and probably just for starters, The Politico presented to a vastly larger readership this story [1], titled "Some on left target McCain's war record":

"Farther to the left -- and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well -- harsher attacks [than Clark's comments] are circulating," observed The Politico. "Sunday, a widely read liberal blog accused McCain of 'disloyalty' during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured."

And The Politico quoted from the "liberal blog": "A lot of people don't know … that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity," wrote the blogger. "Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain's military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief?"

What a wretched thing to say, and in print and for the ages, no less -- and which is why, of course, The Politico wrote such a lengthy piece on it.

I'm scarcely referring to the blogger's questioning of McCain's military past as grounds for commander in chiefdom. That's understandable. But to characterize McCain's broken concessions after unimaginable pain and torture as "disloyalty"? That's merely despicable -- as well as groundwork for a whopper of a backlash.

I wish I could report that the blogger retracted that bit of electorate-alienating extremism in his follow-up interview with The Politico, but he did not, so I cannot.  

What I can report, however, is that the Obama campaign surely recoiled in disgust and horror upon reading such leftward "helpfulness." As they say, with friends like that ...