The McCain campaign’s utter gall is getting more and more impressive with each passing day. The latest:

Rick Davis, campaign manager for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., just told Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace that McCain running mate Gov. Sarah Palin won’t subject herself to any tough questions from reporters “until the point in time when she’ll be treated with respect and deference.”

I wanted to say that she’d better not go anywhere near Bill O’Reilly, but then I recalled that it’s only Democrats that Bill-O treats like scum.

All snarkiness aside, just exactly how snide and abusive does the McCain campaign have to get with the media before it all backfires? Pretty snide and abusive, is my guess, but you never know–the media can be fickle, but I think they know that if they start reporting straight, Obama will start running away with it and it won’t be the close race they’re hoping for. But I betcha there are a lot of reporters out there who are chafing at the bit, held back only by their editors and publishers.

Still, demanding “respect and deference” before granting a media interview? And they call Obama an “elitist”? What a ripsnorter that is!

Update: The McCain campaign announced that they would grant an interview to ABC (how magnanimous of them!). One can only guess at what level of “respect and deference” ABC had to scrape and bow to in order to get the interview. We won’t know until we see it. The McCain campaign claimed that there were “no ground rules on our end,” but the details took two days to work out–so we’re really buying that load of bull about no ground rules. And there may be significance in the fact that they specifically chose Charles Gibson for the interview–the same guy who tore into Obama during one of the debates, so viciously that the audience started booing him.