Spring is usually mud season here on the East Coast -- the snows are melting amid warming temps and there's mud everywhere. At least it signals the start of spring! There's another mud season, of course, the one that comes around every four years and coincides with a Presidential election. This is something of a new-ish phenomenon, since discourse was much more civil fifty years ago when every mis-spoken word didn't go round and round the 24/7 news cycle.

Sarah Palin opened mud season this year, slinging Obama with the old and discounted Bill Ayers attack this past weekend. John McCain's campaign spokeswoman muddied things some more by invoking Tony Rezko's name, though this story has also been hashed and rehashed and found to amount to not a whole lot. John McCain himself indicated today that the gloves are off and he'll pretty much say anything to get elected.

What did Barack Obama do about all this? He said that John McCain was running out of ideas and out of time. Sen. Obama's campaign then unveiled a 13-minute video about John McCain's proven long-term association with Charles Keating, the savings & loan kingpin who caused tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to lose their life savings while he perpetrated a colossal fraud with their money. Keating's debacle (remember the "Keating 5" during the 1980s? sent Keating to prison.) was the start of the financial crisis that we are still slogging through today. A congressional ethics investigation into the whole affair found John McCain guilty of "poor judgment" with respect to Mr. Keating, the patron saint of his political career. No kidding.

All that said, what I see from my kitchen table is that this mud season will do nothing to lower my taxes, improve health care in America, end the misguided war in Iraq or stop global warming. Time and again during this presidential campaign, Sen. Obama has implored Sen. McCain to STAY ON THE ISSUES. How maverick-y is that?